I think the "But this is not intelligence because it is known math" is not a correct argument. It is unknown how the overall higher intelligence of humans works.

What I do notice however is that LLMs are becoming capable of doing an increasing part of the intellectual work I can do, and usually a lot faster.

Just today I presented an agent framework that can take an informal incident statement and propose infrastructure changes to fix it, all evidence backed. This did nothing I could not to, but it did all 5 test cases in 6 - 12 minutes each. I would have found all of the monitoring indications it did, but it would have taken me a day per test case. The LLM also included sass to silly tickets. ("This is not even worth spending monitoring resources on. It's obviously a configuration problem.")

That's how this is reading to me as well. It's just fast at slogging through a certain level of "simple" transformations.

That argument says very little, emergent behavior is a thing in complex systems with billions of parts. Humans can also be reduced to voltage potentials propagating along of tubes of fat and synapses getting rewired.

What does "predicting the next token" mean? I ask this every time people say "LLMs are just predicting the next token" and it's maddening that nobody can give a straight answer. Predicting it according to what probability distribution? Every process that produces a sequence of actions (including e.g. a human writing) can be modeled by some probability distribution and therefore their actions are indistinguishable from "predicting the next token" emitted by that distribution.

> there’s no “intelligence” there BUT

There is clearly intelligence there. We have no way to recognise intelligence other than the appearance of intelligence and this very clearly displays that.

It's also quite clearly different to human intelligence in some notable ways, but not in any that preclude describing it as intelligent. At least for normal non-pedantic definitions of the word.

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