[rvense]

I think it's an interesting debate: what is this thing we've made? And what does its existence teach us about ourselves?

You're right that just going yes it is - no it isn't isn't so interesting, but this mainly stems from the fact that "intelligence" is a poorly defined, pre-scientific term. And really most times you're talking about about whether some X is a Y, you're not so much talking about X as about your definition of Y.

I think the thing is, with LLMs/Generative AI we see some aspects of ourselves, but not enough that we can accept that it is fully like us, hence the resistence. To me, the answer is clear: what is usually called intelligence is actually several different things, of which whatever it is an LLM does is one.