>If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, does it matter?

Depends on what your goals are. LLMs can get to a state where they contain a lot of human knowledge, with a lot of detail, to answer a lot of questions, and be used in many different ways. If your idea of intelligence is akin to having a bunch of experts on tap in all the different areas, then LLMS are totally fine.

I personally want something that can solve problems, not just answer questions. For example, lets say I want to build a flying car, quadcopter style, in my garage. Given the information that exists on the internet and availability of parts, this is a deterministic problem. Given that prompt, I want a set of specific instructions like "buy this part from here", "send this cad model to sendcutsend.com here and select these options", all the way down to "here is a binary file to load on the controller". And along the same lines, the AI should be able to build a full simulator application Flight Sim style, where I can load the file and play with controls to see how the thing behaves, including in less than optimal conditions.

Whatever that model does under the hood, that is called reasoning, and it certainly won't be structured like an LLM.