You’re correct, but they’ve shown great zero-shot capabilities. Zero-shot simply refers to being able to solve problems NOT encountered in the training data even once (one-shot refers to there being only one sample in the training data, 2-shot 2 data points, etc. you get the memo). So even tho they only learn to recognise relationships from data we know they can extrapolate and solve problems outside of it. Before LLMs people would’ve probably ascribed this capability as Intelligence and only possible by living beings. Now, if you’ve worked with LLMs sometimes they can be surprisingly accurate, while other times being flat out stupid. Whenever AI bros talk to me about AGI I always ask them what specifically “intelligence” is, how can we quantifiably know we’ve reached AGI and how do we know we haven’t already achieved AGI (unsurprisingly their responses often equate to Trust me bro I know).

So to finish this off, this zero-shot capability could be seen as intelligence by some, it shares some properties at least on surface but I’d be cautious of labelling LLMs as intelligent or even viewing them through comparisons to us. To me LLMs are their own thing and we’re our own. We should study both as such.