I agree we should see LLMs in a different way. You said it right, the intelligence comes from the data it trains on. And this data comes from an evolutionary process of language and ideas, memetics. So it evolves at a much faster speed than biological agents. It is not personal intelligence, it travels from human to human and from human to AI.
I call it language intelligence. LLMs are just agentified language and the merits lie with the language, not the model. And I believe humans too are just agentified language, but with better embodiment than AIs - we contextually generate language to solve our day to day problems.
One consequence I see is that AI evolution and human evolution are intertwined by language, the common repository of understanding, models and ideas. We both benefit when a new idea gets added to the mix. But memetics is blind in a way, it has no purpose of its own other than diverse idea replication. It is leading both humans and AI into unknown territory.
I call it language intelligence. LLMs are just agentified language and the merits lie with the language, not the model. And I believe humans too are just agentified language, but with better embodiment than AIs - we contextually generate language to solve our day to day problems.
One consequence I see is that AI evolution and human evolution are intertwined by language, the common repository of understanding, models and ideas. We both benefit when a new idea gets added to the mix. But memetics is blind in a way, it has no purpose of its own other than diverse idea replication. It is leading both humans and AI into unknown territory.