What Does It Mean to Be Intelligent? LLMs: Word Calculators or Something More? Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 are often described as “word calculators”: They don’t have an inherent understanding of the world. They can’t reason in the human sense. They can’t set their own goals or desires. Yet, from the seemingly simple objective of next-word prediction, we’ve seen a host of emergent properties. LLMs can: Write code and poetry Summarize complex documents Pass professional exams Hold conversations that feel intelligent These capabilities make LLMs appear very intelligent, even if their underlying mechanism is just statistical pattern matching.