There are still significant limitations, no amount of prompting will get current models to approach abstraction and architecture the way a person does. But I'm finding that these Gemini models are finally able to replace searches and stackoverflow for a lot of my day-to-day programming.
Are we sure they know these things as opposed to being able to consistently guess correctly? With LLMs I'm not sure we even have a clear definition of what it means for it to "know" something.
What is the practical difference you're imagining between "consistently correct guess" and "knowledge"?
LLMs aren't databases. We have databases. LLMs are probabilistic inference engines. All they do is guess, essentially. The discussion here is about how to get the guess to "check itself" with a firmer idea of "truth". And it turns out that's hard because it requires that the guessing engine know that something needs to be checked in the first place.