Exactly. All the people saying LLM's aren't important because it is just auto-complete, really don't connect the dots that humans are also just auto-complete.
Our brain excels at pattern matching. We attribute a lot of human abilities to “intelligence”, but the line between that and pattern-matching (or “autocomplete” ad it’s being referred as here) is being challenged by these latest LLMs.
If it can look at a picture, explain what’s in it, and hypothesize about physics inside the picture’s environment, is it “just pattern matching”?
Those are way too broad terms for this conversation to go anywhere. The point is, what's to say the LLM is not doing "extrapolation via approximation" or some process that is analog to how we think? We barely understand how the brain works to start with.