Ah but I'm not arguing about the rate of change in the trend. I'm saying the signals are decoupled. That is to say an LLM can be as good as a programmer as Linus Torvalds without having even basic knowledge-generalization abilities we assume the median human with no specialized skills would have (when given the same knowledge an LLM has)

I think most LLM proponents would say that "basic knowledge-generalization abilities" is on a different, slower trend line.

I mean, you aren't very surprised that your CPU can crush humans at chess but can barely run an image classifier, right? But you probably wouldn't say (as you are saying with LLMs) that ability for a CPU to play chess is "decoupled" from classifying images. Increases in CPU speed improve both. You'd just say that one is a lot harder than the other.