They do suck at solving problems correctly, however if you give them an incorrect solution and ask them to spot mistakes, or just ask for a general method to do a problem, it works out.
However, they might not yet compare to the best of humans. The best SO answers probably represent 0.01% of the answers, which is a high bar. I am certain very amazing teachers and professors exist out there in the world whom LLMs can't beat yet but the average can't compete.
The discussion was specifically about LLMs to write software. Not about university essays or articles or exams. Are you claiming GPT3.5 is better at writing bug-free software than the average software engineer?
However, I do think a framework needs to be developed for formally learning any particular topic. If you are self learning using just chatgpt, you might miss out on a few key things. I haven't used it much personally but the khan academy bot is close.
For example, Llama is nowhere close (even if it's pretty good).
You can think of GPT4 as a way to flexibly access a lot of knowledge from domain experts. Sure, sometimes that flexibility hallucinates things, but it mostly works and we can verify a large part of it.
