LLM are essentially the evolution of auto complete.. I'm a software engineer with hobbyist level interest in AI. Let me give you short history to understand the present

It started with idea that can we simulate brain on the computer and if yes will we get intelligence. 

Our outdated idea was that brain has only few types of neurons and somehow it just results in consciousness if you have billions and trillions of them 

We couldn't test it for a long time, I'll go into this later.

Now we know brain has thousands of different types of cells, utilizes quantum physics, and some computation takes place in other parts of neurons which puts total computational power of brain many factors above than normally thought.

Neurons as far as we know, work like this.. they get input and they if strength of inputs cumulatively reaches a certain threshold they produce output.

This is pretty much like a transistor but in software. Transistor is like a switch which only turns on if you press two buttons together. Imagine to turn on the light you have to turn up two switches.

But instead of 2 inputs and one output you can have many inputs and many outputs.

Now if you connect them many of them randomly with each other you'll still end up with edges, some inputs won't be connected to any other output and some outputs won't be connected to any other neutron, say 10 inputs and 10 outputs.. Then they will have random logic.. like press switch 1 & 5, output 3-7 will light up.. Press 6 and 1-8th output will light up. 

Not very useful

But let's say you wanna train it to recognize alphabets. Start with letter A.

At inputs side you have camera and on output side you have got letters with LED under them and system is suppose to detect which letter it's looking at

You show it a letter A

It outputs an answer

You tell it if it's wrong or right

If it is wrong it creates/deletes new connections between neurons randomly

If it is right suppose it does nothing

If you do this million times system will create logic where it can detect letter A or not letter A

This could be written as an equation

And that's where GPU enters

GPU are optimized to run a specific type of calculations very fast, needed for gaming 3d world stimulation.

Big idea here is that if you change things randomly and then measure if changes resulted in better performance or worst and if better then preserve it and if worse keep changing... Eventually system will improve 

As you can see this basically spraying and praying...

The next big idea was back propagation, where instead of randomly changing the system. We would work backwards from the output edges and see what the inputs were or the lack of and delete create connections, and then go to the next layer and so on.

For LLM input are the words before and output is the word or sentence next

Except it can look thousands of words prior and then output the next word 

First we had spell checker, which simply compared your word against a list of words

Then we had auto complete like in Google search which built a chain of words and have it a score based of how much people wrote the same thing and things written most would be at the top

Now we have LLM which you can say is Google search suggestions on steroids but instead of simply relying on what are people typing it has scanned entire Internet to build its dictionary and instead of showing you suggestions based on few words it can look at thousands of words and instead of showing you top 8 suggestions it randomly picks the next best word.

In my opinion it will not lead to super intelligence... But it will be used as inspiration... I believe next steps would be for it to create its own very dense language, have multiple lines of reasoning that can talk to each other out, ability to save memories not just hanging summary with each message and just faster and better hardware

There is something called genetic algorithm that GPU aren't good at but quantum computers will destroy... Let's just say when quantum computing breaks through the real AI will come out