> Fully rediscovering what took humans many years to do off-the-cuff is an outrageously high bar.

> What features of a question would you look for to identify whether it's "taking several answers from a database and merging them together" or performing some reasoning? I've asked a few times but don't understand what you're expecting.

You're misunderstanding me, I'm setting no bars, and I have no threshold where this changes. We humans are also just looking things up in our database and doing deductions. We do some computing on urgency as well, like how when we hear a bang our mind goes for danger first before realizing it was harmless, but very similar to what these AIs do. Probabilities and experience. Fresh and novel ideas are very rare in humans as well, and not something I demand before I would consider someone a human.

I did however give you an example that would surprise me, if it considered mass and environment in a way that proves that it understands the problem for what it is. If it told me weight is a human construct and requires gravity/movement and how it depends. An intelligent human doesn't necessarily answer the question it is asked in the way it is phrased. It identifies and irons out misunderstandings, assumptions and other details important to correctly understand the problem, and may even rephrase the question to give a proper response. That would show me a deep understanding of the problem and maybe freak me out a little, but only if the hallucinations are gone and those can be difficult to spot.

This is, just like us, performing calculations and database look-ups. It may feel like it's doing something else but it's not. What would happen if we leave the weights as they are but switch the words? It would give us complete gibberish, but it's no less correct than it was before and it's not even giving us different answers, only the translations to language get distorted. Most people would call it stupid and pointless even if the only change is our interpretation of the answers.

I'm sure Hiroshima, Fukushima and other dangers of radiation is in the training set, as are all of the other steps you mention, it goes round and round testing the numbers based on training. Remember how this chain started, you claimed:

> They're not just retrieving stored text like pulling the most relevant passage from a database. If they were they'd not be able to deal with things outside the training set.

To which I simply replied:

> It's not taking a single answer from a database no, it's taking several based on probability and merging them into what it thinks we're looking for.

I read you (correct me if I'm wrong) as giving this way to much agency. To change my mind that it's doing something unexpected I would ask for logs on the calculations it does, and be able to correlate that to the training set. I have to be able to falsify the conclusions I'm asked to make. I know some people claim we don't understand these algorithms but I assume that's just hyperbole and with the correct measures we could follow every step.

If there are things there which I can not trace I would be very impressed, and honestly a little afraid. They are not trained for every single task, but approximations based on similarities have proven to be very capable even when we think we're out of context (we're not, it doesn't understand context and doesn't care, but neither do most humans).