Absolutely agreed, but I suspect that a whole lot of what humans do every day can be reduced to pattern-following.
If/when LLMs or other AIs can create novel work / discover new knowledge, they will be "genius" in the literal sense of the word.
More genius would be great! (probably) . But genius is not required for the vast majority of tasks.
> Applying an LLM to a novel task is where the model breaks down
I mean, don't most people break down in this case too? I think this needs to be more precise. What is the specific task that you think can reliably distinguish between an LLM's capability in this sense vs. what a human can typically manage?
That is, in the sense of [1], what is the result that we're looking to use to differentiate.
Asking an LLM to take all this knowledge and apply it to a new domain? That will take a whole new paradigm.