> ... including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection.

But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier.

I don't see any fundamental difference in functionality between human intellectual contributions vs performant ML ones (LLM or otherwise).

Whenever we listen or read text we are also predicting the near future content.

Just like LLM's we sometimes correctly predict the next token or word, and sometimes incorrectly.

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model [...]

Imagine someone could pause the universe with a remote control, scroll back in time a little, press play again, and ask a slightly different question, etc.

In such a thought experiment one could also collect the probabilities for a specific human predicting a next word. Implicitly the brain also has a corresponding statistical model, regardless of the construction being visible or hidden. I.e. human intelligence is also fundamentally a statistical model, so the only thing that remains from your claim is that machines for some unmentioned reason don't possess any "real" intelligence or critical thought...

Is it possible that our aversion is simply driven by educational systems collectively and deeply ingraining into populations the idea that intelligence deserves the high costs commanded. Well of course this justifies higher wages towards the higher leadership positions, etc. Now it turns out that intelligence can be dirt cheap. We discover that the fact that "intelligence must be costly so don't question the costs of leadership" was never fundamentally true, so the real anger is this discovery of mismatch between the old claims which served to explain how every society that claimed to order itself and fill positions accordingly with "naturally pre-ordained individuals". Now we are seeing robots exceed average workers, for effectively a grain of rice.