Yep, they’re guessing at patterns in language they’ve “seen” with weights and some randomness thrown in. They’d pick out patterns just as well if fed structured

Yep, they’re guessing at patterns in language they’ve “seen” with weights and some randomness thrown in. They’d pick out patterns just as well if fed structured nonsense. They wouldn’t be stumped by the absence of meaning, confounded by it—they’d power right on, generating text, because understanding isn’t part of what they do. Plays zero role in it. They don’t “understand” anything whatsoever. At best, they’re a subsystem of system that could have something like intelligence. They’re still useful and cool tools but they simply aren’t “thinking” or “understanding” things, because we know what they do and it’s not that.