Also, the racecar example is because of tokenization in LLMs - they don't actually see the raw letters of the text they read. It would be like me asking you to read this sentence in your head and then tell me which syllable would have the lowest pitch when spoken aloud. Maybe you could do it, but it would take effort because it doesn't align with the way you're interpreting the input.

A pre-trained LLM also can also learn new concepts from extremely few examples. Humans may still be much smarter but I think there's a lot of reason to believe that the mechanics are similar.