[oldandtired]

> The answer is obvious. The LLM is understanding the concepts

Who created the LLM? Whose understanding underpins the LLM?

Certainly not the LLM.

> This thing understands you.

Does it? Or is this a result of the intelligence of the human beings involved in building the LLM?

> I had the LLM invent 6 regions and heat the cup of coffee to plasma levels of heat.

Did the LLM actually invent anything? Or was this result directly based on you and your intelligence with the recorded knowledge of all the human sources involved in the solution?

> You're calling it a parlor trick because of subtle errors?

I haven't called it a parlour trick. All I am saying is that there is no intelligence in these systems. Human intelligence built them, but these systems in and of themselves have no intelligence.

We do of course build many intelligent systems all the time, they are called children.

[corethree]

>Who created the LLM? Whose understanding underpins the LLM?

Who created you? Whose understanding underpins you? Asking these questions about you is as irrelevant as asking it about the LLM.

Just because books, educations your teachers, the internet and your parents and the environment shaped everything you know doesn't preclude your membership into the category of things that are capable of understanding.

>Does it? Or is this a result of the intelligence of the human beings involved in building the LLM?

It does understand you. The intelligence of human beings who built it aren't directly involved as it was trained on external data.

>Did the LLM actually invent anything? Or was this result directly based on you and your intelligence with the recorded knowledge of all the human sources involved in the solution?

Does a human actually invent something or is it directly based on recorded knowledge?

You're asking irrelevant questions. Humans do not create things out of thin air either. Humans also invent things by composing existing knowledge to form concepts. The inventing that LLMs can do is equivalent in totality to our understanding of the word "invent"

>I haven't called it a parlour trick. All I am saying is that there is no intelligence in these systems. Human intelligence built them, but these systems in and of themselves have no intelligence.

Totally false. Not only are you wrong but experts in AI including the father of modern AI disagree with you completely and utterly.

If I copied your brain and replicated exactly that brain is "from human intelligence" but that copy of your brain is still an intelligence independent of it's origins and where it got it's knowledge.

>We do of course build many intelligent systems all the time, they are called children.

It's like you're eating your own logic. We also build intelligent systems called LLMs. Same concept.

[oldandtired]

You miss the point of the questions in relation to the LLM. However, your questions are important in relation to the fundamental difference between humans and what they create.

Let me put it this way: Humans are started with a single cell that eventually grows into an extraordinarily complex entity. If you look at new born babies, they have a capability of learning and exploring that we do not see in any artificial construct that we make.

Our artificial constructs have to be essential fully developed physically before we can then start the process of programming them. Humans have a capability to learn as they develop. We see this occur in all living things.

There is a fundamental insurmountable category difference here between living things and artificial constructs that we make.

Any appearance of understanding is based on the logic that we program into these artificial constructs. They cannot exceed what is programmed into them. Interestingly, living organisms can often exceed that. I think that all programmers should undertake a study of living things to gain a greater appreciation of what we do and just how simplistic are the things we do. That is a particular philosophical point of view that I hold.

I think that your appreciation of what we do and the constructs we create is not in accordance with reality. Not that this is particularly strange as far too many people have a much higher view of our technological prowess, especially when comparing to what has gone before. Starting from my undergraduate engineering days and the ongoing study of engineering and technological history, it has become quite clear that we are often today, quite ignorant of just how technologically advanced previous eras were in all sorts of different areas. There are plenty of research groups that are researching how previous generations were able to do things that we do not know how to do today.

> Does a human actually invent something or is it directly based on recorded knowledge?

Here, we do know that there is at least three ways that invention can arise. Logical progression on recorded knowledge, imagination as to how to solve a problem (thinking outside of the box), observation of the natural world around us.

> You're asking irrelevant questions.

For you to say that the questions I asked were irrelevant shows that you have limited yourself in your pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

> Humans do not create things out of thin air either.

When thinking outside of the box, they do. But I suspect that you may not appreciate this particular point.

> Humans also invent things by composing existing knowledge to form concepts.

As pointed out above, this is one mode of invention.

> The inventing that LLMs can do is equivalent in totality to our understanding of the word "invent"

Here, I disagree with you. But that is very likely to be a philosophical/metaphysical difference between us.

> Totally false. Not only are you wrong but experts in AI including the father of modern AI disagree with you completely and utterly.

Do you understand that you have devolved into a fallacious argument here? This is a seriously flawed fallacious argument on your part. The problem here is that your argument assumes that these [experts] you are referring to are correct, when you have not demonstrated that. Nor have they. There are many experts and others (all highly intelligent and talented people) who for all their intelligence and talent are just wrong. This has been shown to be the case many many times throughout the last century (let alone before that) when our understanding has changed because some little known person has come up with anew idea. One of the best examples here would be someone you would know of - Albert Einstein.

Now when you say

> If I copied your brain and replicated exactly that brain is "from human intelligence" but that copy of your brain is still an intelligence independent of it's origins and where it got it's knowledge.

Here, you have a problem. What is the difference between a living brain and a dead brain? In a single instant, we go from life to death and yet we don't know at this point in time what that difference is. There are lots of experiments being done today which are trying to study if there is a non-physical aspect to intelligence and free-will. Different experimenters in the same team have quite different interpretations of what the data means.

Do be so quick to assume that you know, when the researchers who study this can't agree.

> It's like you're eating your own logic. We also build intelligent systems called LLMs. Same concept.

Not at all. Intrinsically different and there is a vast categorical difference between children and our artificial constructs. From your comment, is it a valid assumption that you do not have children of your own or grandchildren of your own or even pets?

Let me ask a question, what is your background in building systems that augment human capability? If you have been involved in building LLM's, let me know.