One thing that LLMs have exposed is how much of a house of cards all of our definitions of "human mind"-adjacent concepts are. We have a single example in all of reality of a being that thinks like we do, and so all of our definitions of thinking are inextricably tied with "how humans think", and now we have an entity that does things which seem to be very like how we think, but not _exactly like it_, and a lot of our definitions don't seem to work any more:

Reasoning, thinking, knowing, feeling, understanding, etc.

Or at the very least, our rubrics and heuristics for determining if someone (thing) thinks, feels, knows, etc, no longer work. And in particular, people create tests for those things thinking that they understand what they are testing for, when _most human beings_ would also fail those tests.

I think a _lot_ of really foundational work needs to be done on clearly defining a lot of these terms and putting them on a sounder basis before we can really move forward on saying whether machines can do those things.

I agree 100% with you. I'm most excited about LLMs because they seem to capture at least some aspect of intelligence, and that's amazing given how much long it took to get here. It's exciting that we don't just understand it.

I see people say, "LLMs aren't human intelligence", but instead, I really feel that it shows that many people, and much of what we do, probably is like an LLM. Most people just hallucinate their way through a conversation, they certainly don't reason. Reasoning is incredibly rare.

Congratulations, you've invented philosophy.

> which seem to be very like how we think

I would like to reassure you that we - we here - see LLMs are very much unlike us.