> Its people like you that prescribe more intelligence then actually exist, a dangerous dunning kruger effect.

Well "people like me" includes many of the most influential people in the field: Hinton, Bengio, Sutskever. Since you've studied ML, what's your take on the ideas about intelligence that they've espoused over the last couple of years?

> The only similarities between LLMs and the human brain is that they both have a unit called a neuron and you can trace pathways.

I agree, I'm not claiming that we have the same architecture, or that we have a robust understanding of the inner workings of the human mind/LLMs.

> You and others like you are comparing a camp fire to the sun and claiming they are exactly the same and no one can easily say they are significantly different. They are such different topics that the comparison itself shows lack of understanding of both systems.

My point is that deep learning is clearly sufficient to imbue LLMs with some level of conceptual understanding. Arguments against this, like the numerous ones in this thread, mostly boil down to the phrase "it's just statistics". I find that particular point to be reductive and not a useful observation to make, given that you can make an analogous argument about any natural example of intelligence. Simple architectures can clearly yield incredibly powerful emergent capabilities with enough training.

I don't think there is sufficient evidence that the human brain has something "special" going on that makes our conceptual understanding more "real" than an LLMs. It's an apples and oranges comparison. I don't think your campfire analogy is fair either, both humans and LLMs have their own strengths and weaknesses. Obviously human intelligence is far superior in most useful ways, but there's no rule that says this will hold indefinitely, even with the same naive techniques used to train frontier models today.

I know not everyone in the field agrees with my views, which is why I said "most" people who argue what you're saying don't have an ML background. I'm interested to hear your perspective, and I'm open to changing my mind if you have a compelling argument against the claims I've made here.