[SwellJoe]

I don't think LLMs get us there, at least based on my understanding of them. You don't get the reasoning at a very high level without a similarly large parameter size.

Though, I don't think we're really at the maximum density of intelligence per byte. Small models of today are approaching the frontier of maybe 2-3 years ago. Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.6 in their dense versions feel quite capable, give them a search tool and they'll research a topic and often give a pretty good explanation of it. They understand more and hallucinate less than GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and maybe even GPT-4 (the first probable trillion parameter model), and their tool capabilities opened the door for agentic use.

But, those small models are still smaller thinkers. It's not a cognitive core that can do anything if given a way to look up the data, though they're more capable than a lot of folks realize.

Also, there's no reliable way to look up data, anyway. The web is poison, approaching the point where naive web search will most likely return misinformation or intentional disinformation. The source of all human knowledge must be viewed as adversarial, now, which makes having thinky machines that search the web and do stuff with the results a risky business.