We keep benchmarking models against the best humans and the best human institutions - then when someone points out that swarms, branching, or scale could close the gap, we dismiss it as "cheating". But that framing smuggles in an assumption that intelligence only counts if it works the way ours does. Nobody calls a calculator a cheat for not understanding multiplication - it just multiplies better than you, and that's what matters.
LLMs are a different shape of intelligence. Superhuman on some axes, subpar on others. The interesting question isn't "can they replicate every aspect of human cognition" - it's whether the axes they're strong on are sufficient to produce better than human outcomes in domains that matter. Calculators settled that question for arithmetic. LLMs are settling it for an increasingly wide range of cognitive work. The fact that neither can flip a burger is irrelevant.
Humans don't have a monopoly on intelligence. We just had a monopoly on generality and that moat is shrinking fast.
