Because they are. This is some crazy semantic denial. I should stop engaging with this nonsense.
We have AI that is kind of close to passing the Turing test and people still say it's not intelligent...
These machines are only able to output text.
It seems hard to think they could reasonably think any -normal- person.
Tech only feels like magic if you don't know how it works
Not really. Most of those seemingly novel problems are permutations of existing ones, like the one you mentioned. A solution is simply a specific permutation of tokens in the training data which humans are not able to see.
This doesn't mean that the permutation is something that previously didn't exist, let alone that it's something that is actually correct, but those scenarios are much rarer.
None of this is to say that these tools can't be useful, but thinking that this is intelligence is delusional.
> We have AI that is kind of close to passing the Turing test and people still say it's not intelligent...
The Turing test was passed arguably decades ago. It's not a test of intelligence. It's an _imitation game_ where the only goal is to fool humans into thinking they're having a text conversation with another human. LLMs can do this very well.
They generate statistically plausible answers (to simplify the answer) based on the training set and weights they have.
A simple nonsense programming task would suffice. For example "write a Python function to erase every character from a string unless either of its adjacent characters are also adjacent to it in the alphabet. The string only contains lowercase a-z"
That task isn't anywhere in its training set so they can't memorise the answer. But I bet ChatGPT and Claude can still do it.
Honestly this is sooooo obvious to anyone that has used these tools, it's really insane that people are still parroting (heh) the "it just memorises" line.