What is an intellectual task? Once again, there's tons of stuff LLMs won't be trained on in the next 3 years. So it would be trivial to just find one of those things and say voila! LLMs aren't better than me at that.

I'll make one prediction that I think will hold up. No LLM-based system will be able to take a generic ask like "hack the nytimes website and retrieve emails and password hashes of all user accounts" and do better than the best hackers and penetration testers in the world, despite having plenty of training data to go off of. It requires out-of-band thinking that they just don't possess.

I'll take a stab at this: LLMs currently seem to be rather good at details, but they seem to struggle greatly with the overall picture, in every subject.

- If I want Claude Code to write some specific code, it often handles the task admirably, but if I'm not sure what should be written, consulting Claude takes a lot of time and doesn't yield much insight, where as 2 minutes with a human is 100x more valuable.

- I asked ChatGPT about some political event. It mirrored the mainstream press. After I reminded it of some obvious facts that revealed a mainstream bias, it agreed with me that its initial answer was wrong.

These experiences and others serve to remind me that current LLMs are mostly just advanced search engines. They work especially well on code because there is a lot of reasonably good code (and tutorials) out there to train on. LLMs are a lot less effective on intellectual tasks that humans haven't already written and published about.