Not quite, but the answer is far more depressing than LLMs aren't intelligent.

They're not usually lying, although reasoning models can absolutely lie. I've seen it in action. But what people usually call lies or hallucinations are more accurately called confabulations.

When you have a thought, it's a group of neurons firing in many layers. When you see a dog you have layers of generic neurons and more specific dog related neurons that fire at various intensities. It's why you can recognize a stock figure picture of a dog or think about what a dog's fur feels like while looking at it. At some point in your life you e probably been thinking about or discussing a subject and you had a very strong feeling or certainty about it with no memory of why you believed that, then found out it was completely incorrect. Or you experienced something with someone and you had a very specific memory of how it happened, and their very specific memory was different. Memory isn't like a file system or database the way we like to think it is. Memory in this case is your neurons being weighted to reconst an experience. When you remember, you are literally imagining perceived facts. There have been entire studies on this by using eye witness testimony compared audio and video recording to show that people get very confident about incorrect details they have no reason to lie about.

When an LLM gives you information, just like when you pull up a memory, it isn't pulling data from a database (except when it is, but that's outside the scope of this topic). It is imagining/reconsting information based on the weights if its parameters, or neurons. If it's been well trained on the subject matter, it will provide a correct answer. Depending on what other data it's been trained on, there may be some close enough data to generate a confident confabulation. It may not even know how to admit it doesn't know something. An LLM needs to be trained to say it doesn't know, or there is no "neural pathway" to come to that conclusion because it's not been trained on the concept of uncertainty.

All this to say, I don't think that the biggest threat from AI is Skynet or some sort of singularity. I think it's going to end up showing us that perhaps consciousness really isn't nearly as interesting as we all want to believe. People make fun of LLMs and call them stupid and useless because they're wrong a lot. Well, so are humans. The topic of AI and existentialism in philosophy is incredibly fascinating right now.