I'm not sure that's fair, or correct. The behavior of an LLM is set by the design of the combination of loss function and training data. Achieving it is the desired result of the selection of those.
> It happens that they seem to exhibit some similarities to human cognition as a side effect
Yes, the desired behavior of nearly all LLM projects is to emulate the capabilities of human cognition, and that stated goal is the justification that organizations are using for spending millions to train them.
> but that does not mean they are on some developmental path to a "full human" like a child.
You are the first to suggest any such thing, in this comment chain. But, the field of AI is objectively on that development path, since that is the stated goal of many of the orgs, with LLM existing on that path. If that path actually leads anywhere is anyone's guess.
I'm sorry, did you miss the original post: "Because they are at a child level of development. Give it a few years."
I extrapolated a little bit, but not much. They were clearly implying that it is on a similar developmental path as a child.
It's entirely possible that LLMs will one day emulate adult speech without ever passing through the child development stages. The stages it takes to get there will be distinct.
I'm not sure how familiar with LLM or children you are, but in my experience, they absolutely make the same types of logic/"critical thinking" mistakes that children do, as this article you're replying under demonstrates.
