[acchow]

Sure, children can pattern match. But I was thinking more about seasoned mathematicians, who not only create new theorems but can also understand proofs and thus find errors in proofs and decide they are wrong, or can be correct. They can also construct new mathematical structures, which other people may eventually use in novel ways to solve old problems. None of this seems anything remotely like "pattern matching" in any way.

I don't disagree with the notion that "probably 80% of Americans/humans are just glorified autocomplete engines", but what about the people with proper ingenuity that is either provably correct in the mathematical sense, or can build up a tapestry of understanding from which we can build predictions about reality (in the physics sense).

Pretty much everything else I do in life - riding a bike, cooking food, composing/enjoying music, etc - can be done with estimates and pattern matching. But the "correctness" of math proofs seems to me to not fit the approximation/estimations that language models use.