> I'll say this against your perspective (or perhaps just use of language), though: it seems to leave little room for skepticism of the greatest general (not pr

> I'll say this against your perspective (or perhaps just use of language), though: it seems to leave little room for skepticism of the greatest general (not product-specific) claims made today in the AI industry. Maybe I can alleviate this to an extent by expanding on my views, since I believe that's not the case. I tried alluding to this by saying that, in my view, models have an understanding [of things], but to put it in more explicit terms, for me "understanding" on its own is a fairly weak term. Like I personally consider the semantic diffing tool I use to diff YAMLs to have an understanding of YAML. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a literal sense. The understanding is hardwired, sure, but to me that makes no difference. It may also not even be completely YAML standard-compliant, which is what would be the "equivalent" of an AI model understanding something to an extent but not fully or not right. This leaves a lot of room for criticism and skepticism, as that means models can have elementary understandings of things, that while are understandings, are nevertheless not e.g. meaningfully useful in practice, or fail to live up to the claims and hype vendors spout. Which is sometimes exactly how I view a lot of the models available today. They are not capable of fully understanding what I write, and to the extent they are, they do not necessarily understand it the way I'd expect them to (i.e. as a human). But instead of me classifying this as them not understanding, I still decidedly consider these tools to be just often on the immature, beginning side of a longer spectrum that to me is understanding. I hope this makes sense, even if you still do not find this view agreeable or relatable. You may argue that my definition is too wide, and that then everything can "understand", but that's not necessarily how I think of this either. A "more rigorous" way of putting my thoughts would be that I think things can understand to the extent they can hold representations of some specific thing and manipulate them while keeping to that representation (pretty much what happens when you traverse a model's latent space in a specific axis). But I'm not sure I spent enough time thinking about this thoroughly to be able to confidently tell you that this is a complete and consistent description, fully reflective of my understanding of understanding (pun intended). Like when in an image model you can quite literally manipulate the gender, hairstyle, clothing of characters depicted by moving along specific directions, to me that is a clear evidence of that model having an understanding of these concepts, and in the literal sense.