As they say, "think about how smart the average person is, then realize half the population is below that". There are far more haikus than opuses walking this planet.
We keep benchmarking models against the best humans and the best human institutions - then when someone points out that swarms, branching, or scale could close the gap, we dismiss it as "cheating". But that framing smuggles in an assumption that intelligence only counts if it works the way ours does. Nobody calls a calculator a cheat for not understanding multiplication - it just multiplies better than you, and that's what matters.
LLMs are a different shape of intelligence. Superhuman on some axes, subpar on others. The interesting question isn't "can they replicate every aspect of human cognition" - it's whether the axes they're strong on are sufficient to produce better than human outcomes in domains that matter. Calculators settled that question for arithmetic. LLMs are settling it for an increasingly wide range of cognitive work. The fact that neither can flip a burger is irrelevant.
Humans don't have a monopoly on intelligence. We just had a monopoly on generality and that moat is shrinking fast.
The "God of the gaps" theory is a theological and philosophical viewpoint where gaps in scientific knowledge are cited as evidence for the existence and direct intervention of a divine creator. It asserts that phenomena currently unexplained by science—such as the origin of life or consciousness—are caused by God.
We are doing inversion of God of gaps to "LLM of Gaps" where gaps in LLM capabilities are considered inherently negative and limiting
It is not actually the gaps in capability, and instead it arises from an understanding of how it works and an honest acknowledgement of how far it could go.
The question is not if these things are actually intelligent or not. The question is if these things will be useful without an endless supply of training data and continuous re-alignment using it..
And the questions "Are these things really intelligent" is just a proxy for that.
And we are interested in that question because that is necessary to justify the massive investment these things are getting now. It is quite easy to look at these things and conclude that it will continue to progress without any limit.
But that would be like looking at data compression at the time of its conception, and thinking that it is only a matter of time we can compress 100GB into 1KB..
We live in a time of scams that are obvious if you take a second look. If something that require much deeper scrutiny, then it is possible to generate a lot more larger bubble.
> and that moat is shrinking fast..
The point is that in reality it is not. It is just appearance. If you consider how these things work, then there is no justification of this conclusion.
I have said this elsewhere, but the problem of Hallucination itself along with the requirement of re-training, the smoking gun that these things are not intelligence in ways that would justify these massive investments.