Note that we are talking about a “good” intern here

Unreasonably good. Beyond fresh junior employee good. Also, that's your standard; 'MPSimmons said to treat the model as "naive but intelligent" intern, not a good one.

Indeed. My expectation of a good intern is to produce nothing I will put in production, but show aptitude worth hiring them for. It's a 10 week extended interview with lots of social events, team building, tech talks, presentations, etc.

Which is why I've liked the LLM analogy of "unlimited free interns".. I just think some people read that the exact opposite way I do (not very useful).

If I had to respect the basic human rights of my LLM backends, it would probably be less appealing - but "Unlimited free smart-for-being-braindead zombies" might be a little more useful, at least?

Interns, at least on paper, have the optionality of getting better with time in observable obvious ways as they become grad hires, junior engineers, mid engineers etc.

So far, 2 years of publicly accessible LLMs have not improved for intern replacement tasks at the rate a top 50% intern would be expected to.