I’m not really interested in papers that either don’t understand LLMs or play word games with intelligence

I mean, my first paper was from Max Tegmark. My second paper was from Microsoft. You are discounting a well known expert in the field and one of the leading companies working on AI as not understanding LLMs.

Human intelligence is a mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.

I note that's the definition for "human intelligence." But either way, sure, LLMs alone can't learn from experience (after training and between multiple separate contexts), and they can't manipulate their environment. BabyAGI, AgentGPT, and similar things can certainly manipulate their environment using LLMs and learn from experience. LLMs by themselves can totally adapt to new situations. The paper from Microsoft discusses that. However, for sure, they don't learn the way people do, and we aren't currently able to modify their weights after they've been trained (well without a lot of hardware). They can certainly do in-context learning.

Yes. LLMs are not magic, they are math, and we understand how they work. Deep under the hood, they are manipulating mathematical vectors that in no way are connected representationally to words. In the end, the result of that math is reapplied to a linguistic model and the result is speech. It is an algorithm, not an intelligence.

We understand how they work? From the Wikipedia page on LLMs:

Large language models by themselves are "black boxes", and it is not clear how they can perform linguistic tasks. There are several methods for understanding how LLM work.

It goes on to mention a couple things people are trying to do, but only with small LLMs so far.

Here's a quote from Anthropic, another leader in AI:

We understand the math of the trained network exactly – each neuron in a neural network performs simple arithmetic – but we don't understand why those mathematical operations result in the behaviors we see.

They're working on trying to understand LLMs, but aren't there yet. So, if you understand how they do what they do, then please let us know! It'd be really helpful to make sure we can better align them.

they are manipulating mathematical vectors that in no way are connected representationally to words

Is this not what word/sentence vectors are? Mathematical vectors that represent concepts that can then be linked to words/sentences?

Anyway, I think time will tell here. Let's see where we are in a couple years. :)

I’m not really interested in papers that either don’t understand LLMs or play word games with intelligence