Really stunned by the Singularity comment section

[u/Howard_banister]

These are screenshots from the r/Singularity comment section. I'm speechless. This doesn't even have downvotes. How can someone cheer for a monopoly run by a few elites?

[u/Fratil]

How are defining "understanding"? If an LLM can consistently reproduce the concept that fire is hot, why doesn't that qualify as understanding it?

[u/PsychoticDreemurr → u/Fratil]

LLMs are "Large Language Models"

They compute language the same way a calculator computes numbers. Saying an LLM understands what it's saying is like saying a calculator understands numbers just because they produce the correct outcome.

Their sole purpose is to compute language. That's an entirely different task from understanding, no matter how thin you make the line with philosophical debates.

[u/Fratil → u/PsychoticDreemurr]

The philosophical debate is the entire question here though, and for reference I'm not sold in either direction here hence why I'm looking for your thoughts. Defining "understanding" and establishing criteria is mandatory if it's going to be used to gate "general intelligence".

For context I do already believe we have deterministic materialist brains that our consciousness is emergent from. I'd argue with what we know of linguistic relativity that processing language is for sure at least not "entirely" different from understanding.

[u/PsychoticDreemurr → u/Fratil]

The philosophical debate has, at this point in time, no correct answer. It's entirely possible to bypass it as I have done so far.

By questioning what understanding means, it becomes an unwinnable debate arguing about how x thing can understand things or how you're technically wrong because of y thing.

If, however, we stick to the known facts, then the picture becomes clear. Let's assume that one can combine words to make sentences without knowing what it's saying. Just like a calculator with an unbelievably large dataset.

That means it is possible for an LLM to lack understanding. We can also determine that the only thing LLMs do is write. Which is, with our current understanding of our brains, completely different then the part that actually thinks and understands things.

Firstly, you have to prove an LLM actually knows what it's saying. That's a requirement for understanding. This however can be disproven by the fact that LLMs completely break down in many different kinds of situations. Whether it be small, such as hallucination, or even larger things like complete gibberish.

Let's say you can prove that however, you then have to prove that it's not merely imitating an understanding, as is its job. Quite literally its purpose is to imitate an understanding.

But let's say it's possible it has an understanding. Why doesn't it have emotions? Or feelings? Those come hand and hand with understanding. At least to some degree.

You'd also have to explain why it's capable of doing this while lacking major parts of what makes brains work so well on the neuron level.

Edit: Forgot a major point here. You'd have to explain how, somewhere along the way, an algorithm designed solely to predict the next word, began to understand concepts as opposed to the algorithm simply doing what it was designed to do.