The alternative I'm considering is that It might just be that it's just a dataset problem, feeding these llms on words makes the lack a huge facet of embodied axistance that is needed to get context.
I am a nobody though, so who knows....
They do seem to do generalisation, to at least some degree.
If it was literal memorisation, we do literally have internet search already.
Right now they are limited by the context, but that's probably a temporary limitation.
("You think before you speak". That thinking of course does not stop at "sounding" proper - it has to be proper in content...)
If an LLM can predict the next word without doing a critical evaluation, then it raises the question of what the intelligent people are doing. They might not be doing a critical evaluation at all.
Well certainly: in the mind ideas can be connected tentatively by affinity, and they become hypotheses of plausible ideas, but then in the "intelligent" process they are evaluated to see if they are sound (truthful, useful, productive etc.) or not.
Intelligent people perform critical evaluation, others just embrace immature ideas passing by. Some "think about it", some don't (they may be deficient in will or resources - lack of time, of instruments, of discipline etc.).
And who says LLM are not able to do that (eventually)?
They are not _good_ at it right now, and they are totally bad at making generalizations. But who says it's not just an artifact of the limited context?
Why? I think it absolutely can be intelligence.