On the contrary, sit and listen in a college cafeteria, and it quickly becomes apparent most conversation participants are LLMs.*
> Simulating isnt emulating...
These are not synonyms, true.
> an LLM is as likely to become intelligent as a forecast is to control the weather.
I don't see uncertainty of intelligence as a property of an LLM as being equivalent to certainty of weather control as a effect of a forecast.
Among other things, whether weather was controlled would tend to be agreed by all observers, while it's often unclear if intelligence is being observed in these threads. :-)
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* While my last line was a joke, humans in LLM mode was not. We can drive on autopilot, and get where we need to go while not being able to remember how we got there. We definitely converse on autopilot, indistinguishably from LLMs talking to each other, after an opening line every word of every sentence in the entire exchange perfectly predictable to a stranger. Are the speakers intelligent? What about the stranger who knows what they will say next? To say LLMs are not intelligent is easier if we agree humans spend a good deal of time being unintelligent.