We still don't understand how these models really work, at least not in a way that teaches us anything about language or about humanity.
I find that a strange take. Almost all scientific advancement ends in one thing. Another set of unanswered questions. Quite often we gain more knowledge, but know less because we realize there are thousands more questions we should have been asking.
For example, theory of mind being observed out of just processing language is a big arrow that we may have been thinking about many things wrong in the past and open new avenues for 'scientific' tests that give us answers.
Is there a "hacker news" of theory of mind researchers? Probably some interesting conversations happening over there.
We understand how LLMs work conceptually. Human language, when parameterized as a sequence of tokens, has geometry and structure in a billion dimensional space. A priori, we didn't know that. So in a very real sense, a discovery was made.
FTFY. At least any kind of actually notable scientific advancement like using metals, farming, steam power, electricity, cars, planes, computers, etc.
If a person can use a chatbot to speed up their work then that's a major advancement in productivity right there.
We’ve effectively made like a general teenager that can be up-trained for specific tasks. It’s super useful if you know how to use it.
The unexplained Chain-of-Thought emerges from LLM surely would an huge gain in "knowledge". In fact I'd say it potentially the most important meta-knowledge human race can gain, you know, to unlock the mystery of "conciousness" itself.