>The truth is it's just as far from intelligence your music playback device is from having Elvis inside of it.
A music playback device's purpose is to allow you hear Elvis' voice. A good device does it well: you hear Elvis' voice (maybe with some imperfections). Whether a real Elvis is inside of it or not, doesn't matter - its purpose is fulfilled regardless. By your analogy, an LLM simply reproduces what an intelligent person would say on the matter. If it does its job more-less, it doesn't matter either, whether it's "truly intelligent" or not, its output is already useful. I think it's completely irrelevant in both cases to the question "how well does it do X?" If you think about it, 95% we know we learned from school/environment/parents, we didn't discover it ourselves via some kind of scientific method, we just parrot what other intelligent people said before us, mostly. Maybe human "intelligence" itself is 95% parroting/basic pattern matching from training data? (18 years of training during childhood!)
A music playback device's purpose is to allow you hear Elvis' voice. A good device does it well: you hear Elvis' voice (maybe with some imperfections). Whether a real Elvis is inside of it or not, doesn't matter - its purpose is fulfilled regardless. By your analogy, an LLM simply reproduces what an intelligent person would say on the matter. If it does its job more-less, it doesn't matter either, whether it's "truly intelligent" or not, its output is already useful. I think it's completely irrelevant in both cases to the question "how well does it do X?" If you think about it, 95% we know we learned from school/environment/parents, we didn't discover it ourselves via some kind of scientific method, we just parrot what other intelligent people said before us, mostly. Maybe human "intelligence" itself is 95% parroting/basic pattern matching from training data? (18 years of training during childhood!)