yeah my analogy is not so good… LLMs suck with factual stuff, they are better with coding or languages (Claude has been really helpful to me with Estonian).

Well yes, they are glorified text autocomplete, but they still have their uses which could be considered “smart”. For example I was struggling with a programming thing today and an LLM helped me out, so in a way it is smarter than me in that specific thing. I think it’s less that they are dumb and more that they have no agency whatsoever, they have to be pushed into the direction you want. Pretty annoying…

LLMs are smart in the way someone is smart who has read all the books and knows all of them but has never left the house. Basically all theory and no street smarts.