Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more you try to look into the LLM internals, the more similarities you find. Humanlike concepts, language-invariant circuits, abstract thinking, world models. Mechanistic interpretability is struggling, of course. But what it found in the last 5 years is still enough to dispel a lot of the "LLMs are merely X" and "LLMs can't Y" myths - if you are up to date on the relevant research. It's not just the outputs. The…
Without a direct comparison to human internals (grounded in neurobiology, rather than intuition), it's hard to say how similar these similarities are, and if they're not simply a result of the transparency illusion (as Sydney Lamb defines it). However, if you can point us to some specific reading on mechanistic interpretability that you think is relevant here, I would definitely appreciate it.
Despite all that, the calculator and the arithmometer do the same things. If you can't go up an abstraction level and look past low level implementation details, then you'll remain blind to that fact forever.
What papers depends on what you're interested in. There's a lot of research - ranging from weird LLM capabilities and to exact operation of reverse engineered circuits.