> "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?"
Independent frontier maths research, i.e. coming up with and proving (preferably numerous) significant new theorems without human guidance.
I say that not because I think the task is special among human behaviours. I think the mental faculties that mathematicians use to do such research are qualitatively the same ones all humans use in a wide range of behaviours that AI struggles to emulate.
I say it because it's both achievable (in principle, if LLMs can indeed think like humans) and verifiable. Achievable because it can be viewed as a pure text generation task and verifiable because we have well-established, robust ways of establishing the veracity, novelty and significance of mathematical claims.
It needs to be frontier research maths because that requires genuinely novel insights. I don't consider tasks like IMO questions a substitute as they involve extremely well trodden areas of maths so the possibility of an answer being reachable without new insight (by interpolating/recombining from vast training data) can't be excluded.
If this happens I will change my view on whether LLMs think like humans. Currently I don't think they do.
That's quite a high bar for thinking like humans which rules out 99.99% of humans.
Google's AlphaEvolve independently discovered a novel matrix multiplication algorithm which beats SOTA on at least one axis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGCmu7YKgPA
This, so much. Many mathematicians and physicists believe in intuition as a function separate from intelect. One is more akin to a form of (inner) perception, whereas the other is generative - extrapolation based on pattern matching and statistical thinking. That second function we have a handle on and getting better at it every year, but we don't even know how to define intuition properly. A fascinating book that discusses this phenomena is Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, a Western Perspective [1]
This quote from Grothendieck [2] (considered by many the greatest mathematician of the 20th century) points to a similar distinction: The mathematician who seeks to understand a difficult problem is like someone faced with a hard nut. There are two ways to go about it. The one way is to use a hammer — to smash the nut open by brute force. The other way is to soak it gently, patiently, for a long time, until it softens and opens of itself.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Loves-Hide-Quantum-Perspective...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck