>I'm not sure why people keep thinking that it "understands" anything. Because we humans are hard wired to interpret language as a signal of intelligence and s

>I'm not sure why people keep thinking that it "understands" anything. Because we humans are hard wired to interpret language as a signal of intelligence and sapience, of a "thing like us." It's extremely counterintuitive to most people to be able to hold a coherent conversation with an entity that has no actual understanding of anything it seems to be talking about. Because there are billions of dollars being poured into advertising LLMs as essentially intelligent agents that can and do understand things, often better and more reliably than human beings. I've seen numerous people refer to them having access to "the sum of all human knowledge," implying that not only are they intelligent, they should be considered nigh omniscient. There's a lot of money at state in establishing cultural (and then legal) precedent for LLMs being intelligent agents equivalent to human beings, where issues like fair use and copyright are concerned. Because people want to believe. For various reasons, many to do with decades of pop culture and sci fi informing people's idea of what "AI" is, there's a transhumanist faith in the inevitability of AGI and singularity within tech that has just been waiting for some emergent phenomenon to fill that void, and LLMs seem good enough. I think there's a similar phenomenon at work with people's enthusiasm for Elon Musk as well, these things appear to point towards the kind of future that nerds read about in books.