May be they appear intelligent to us because we are primitive and new to such an entity. Imagine some laymen from like a thousand years back could experience Google and Stack overflow. Having no idea of the internet or computers, wouldn't they consider it to be intelligent to some extent?

And just like those ancient people had not have an understanding of the concept of an internet and massive capacity to store and retrive data, we does not have a widespread understanding of how LLMs map concepts in a way that can do fuzzy searches. Once we understand it, may be they will look like a regular search...