Is the LLM smart or are you not?

-“I don't understand how you can pretend that simple next-token prediction models can do what humans brains can!”I hear this a lot - and to me it sounds like pushback against how Large Language Models (LLMs) keep making advancements. But here is a different perspective: Maybe it's less about LLMs being “smart” in a human sense and more about the fact that we vastly overestimate how clever our own brains actually are.To understand this, we can just go look at human psychology:Imagine a study where people are asked to participate in a “guess the price” experiment. They enter a room, provide the last two digits of their social security number, and are then shown common household goods. They are asked to estimate the cost of these items.The results are remarkably consistent. People whose last two digits are higher (50-99) consistently make higher cost estimates than those with lower digits (00-49).This is essentially a "hack" on the human brain, a predictable cognitive shortcut (anchoring…