Intelligent humans are capable of following diverse and intricate analogies and draw lessons from seemingly unrelated events. Try asking an LLM to summarize an article and use an imprecise way to state your view. Ask it to push back. You will be drawn into so many pedantic arguments that burn through your tokens within a few messages, you'd wonder if there's someone deliberately taking over the keyboard on their side and spending your token limit. This would never happen with an intelligent human being unless they have nothing better to do and want to troll. This is a speech pattern that LLMs are trained on, it's not a show of intelligence. This also applies to LLMs claiming consciousness: The internet is full of people writing about sentience, talking to "superior aliens" in blog posts, forum threads etc. It's the speech pattern that's copied, not actual thoughts and feelings because LLMs perceive, suffer, have aims or dreams...

Agentic systems use LLMs, and they are absolutely able to follow diverse and intricate analogies. I use them frequently to hunt down notoriously difficult to find memory leaks, in codebases too large for a human to read in a single sitting. They are able to not only follow those intricate paths, they're able to discover solutions and apply those solutions. I use these systems quite a bit, and it's nothing like you've described.