Technology

That is no more understanding the problem than my spelling or grammar checking understands the comment I’m writing.

My general point would be that even a grammar checking can have some form of understanding of the text, no matter how shallow. The checker probably has a rule for when a is used versus an, if this rule generalizes across new words that rule that were previously unseen is a form of 'understanding' of the language being used in my view, despite being overly simplistic, while rote memorization - having a list of words that are followed by an - may not be.

LLMs are a weird case, because their internal representations for many concepts generalize even across new settings / inputs - in that sense the model has a form of understanding of what is being given, while for many other concepts the patterns break down even in the simplest of cases. It may 'know' that the preceding text is the writing of an essay - and it should autocomplete accounting for that -as is defined in its weights, but this understanding is shallow - it does not know why it knows, or how it knows - it cannot self reflect as it does not see and understand its own internal workings, or account for that. Yet the internal representations represent a form of text understanding that can be useful nonetheless - it is a language model after all.

My comment was intended to show this duality, hence the duality between the two paragraphs.

And this is the crux of my beef, I think, because stochastic pattern matching is not understanding, it’s a mathematical representation of how the model processes your input tokens. The fact that it has to start over every time you provide it input, and uses the previous input/output tokens as context is why this is not ‘understanding’, it’s just fancy token prediction that gives a middling-to-passable facsimile to intelligence and understanding things.

The problems you note in your second paragraph fundamentally undermine the argument that there is any form of understanding to the AI, because those are basic mistakes that a trivial understanding of the problem would prevent.

I am not entirely grasping the point you are trying to make here. I am certainly not arguing that it is conscious, self-aware, or in any way not a mechanical procedure that is being performed (I would not argue for that!). My key point is that it is not a simple black or white it understands / it does not understand - it may have internal representations that relate many concepts together, allowing it to draw upon these links when generating text, giving it a certain semantic understanding of the language and text it is using, while simultaneously not having a bit of self-awareness.