[goatlover]

I'm saying that when humans use language, it's about stuff in the world and ourselves. The words have references or uses that we call meaning. When an LLM models language, it is approximating the patterns of language use we have produced that have been made available to it. It doesn't understand what the words it's producing are about (no external references), only how to produce those words in patterns that are meaningful to us.

What if we fed an LLM a bunch of crazy nonsense instead? It would model the patterns in the word use and then give us answers based on the nonsense it was fed. But it wouldn't understand that it's actually nonsense that doesn't apply to the real world.