• Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    My point is that saying an LLM understands anything is anthropomorphizing the LLM and leads people into thought patterns that give it an inordinate amount of authority because people equate the simulacrum of understanding/comprehension with actual understanding.

    I think we just fundamentally disagree on the concept of llms a being able to understand a topic rather than it being a shallow statistical prediction if the correct answer, and I just can’t equate understanding with statistical predictions. The fact that the underlying math is able to generalize the prediction in novel ways lends weight to the misbelief that it understands concepts, but the decoherence that happens over long conversations should shatter the illusion.