[benrutter]

I should say that quote was referring to a calculator - I wasn't trying to stake a position on LLMs in that comment, more just pointing out that I think its consistent to think they're helpful without thinking they have AGI.

There's obviously a lot more of a case for suggesting LLMs are generally intelligent than a calculator, but for me, I think the key point is that understanding them as "next token generators" is a lot more helpful to explain things like hallucinations and some of the other issues/loops they get into.

For me, if understanding models as "generally intelligent agents operating with an internal model of the world" explained their behaviour better than "next token generators", I'd think calling them "smart" would have some justification[0]. I'm just a person on the internet though, and defining intelligence is pretty rarely clear, even without bringing LLMs into the mix.

[0] In case it's interesting to anyone, I'm basically given a half-baked version of how Daniel Dennet defined intention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance