> Which gets into the concept of whether the ML model has actually learned some deeper conceptual ideas than we have, some deeper truth about how this works. W

> Which gets into the concept of whether the ML model has actually learned some deeper conceptual ideas than we have, some deeper truth about how this works. Well I think that the results speak for themselves; ultimately the question you raise is one of semantics. ML models don't think in terms of "conceptual ideas" like humans do, these models simply perform at such a massive statistical scale that they can identify patterns far beyond any human conception. Clearly, the model embodies some verifiably reliable information about the way the world works, but this is "just" a trick of statistics not anything resembling actual "understanding" in the way the word is typically used when referring to human understanding.