Right. It's actually amazing that large language models can be as effective as they are, given that at their core they are simply matching up word-frequency patterns. But with a large enough context and enough parameters, those word-frequency patterns actually do a decent job of simulating intelligence: I'm able to give rather ambiguous instructions to Claude Code (like "go back to the suggestion you made a while back about (foo) and explain in more detail what the benefits and drawbacks of that approach would be"), and it is able to look through its context, find the part where it suggested (foo), and expand on its suggestion. This is a qualitative difference in human-computer interaction: I can type instructions that are very similar to what I would say to another human being, rather than having to be utterly unambiguous the way you have to be in writing code. It's also good at synthesizing information faster than I could: these days instead of searching MSDN for some obscure API method, I ask Claude "what's the syntax to create a foo from a bar?" and it finds me the MakeBarIntoFoo method faster than I would have (especially because I would have started with CreateFooFromBar and not found it).

But I never forget that it's a simulation of intelligence. I use it for the things it's trained on (generating code) and I don't expect the model to be good at writing poetry, or fiction. Nor do I expect it to have any actual understanding of the things it is actually trained on. Modern models are pretty good at simulating understanding, but even so they will still produce things that a human being would immediately know is wrong, e.g. image-generation models producing hands with the wrong number of fingers, or a person with three arms, or whatever. Those happen less and less often as models have been better trained (and I bet that verification steps are happening behind the scenes to catch and discard some of the classic mistakes), but they still happen.

It's the dancing bear, except this bear is actually managing some really spectacular dance moves. Some of the time. Other times it falls flat on its face. But it's really, really impressive that the bear is actually managing to dance so well.