Totally, and that’s a fair point. I don’t know what understanding means, not enough to prove an LLM can’t, anyway, and I think nobody has a good enough definiti

Totally, and that’s a fair point. I don’t know what understanding means, not enough to prove an LLM can’t, anyway, and I think nobody has a good enough definition yet to satisfy this crowd. But I think we can make progress with nothing more than the dictionary definition of “understand”, which is the ability to perceive and interpret. I think we can probably agree that a rock doesn’t understand. And we can probably also agree that a random number generator doesn’t understand. The problem with @FeepingCreature’s argument is that the quality of the response does matter. The ability for a machine that’s specifically designed to wait for input and then provide an output, to then provide a low quality response, doesn’t demonstrate any more intelligence than a bicycle… right? I don’t know where the line is between my random writer Markov chain text generator from college and today’s LLMs. I’m told transformers are fundamentally the same and just have an adaptive window size. More training data then is the primary difference. So then we are saying Excel’s least-squares function fitter does not understand, unless the function has a billion data points? Or, if there’s a line, what does it look like and where is it?