[dboreham]

> it needs to understand what it is talking about

"to understand" is a concept invented by the human brain to help it operate. It doesn't actually mean anything concrete in the physical world. See: the Chinese room argument (paradoxically it proves the converse of what Searle was arguing -- that there is no such thing as understanding, because you can emulate a system with identical outputs from the same set of inputs without caring or labeling what happens inside the room).

[scudsworth]

that's, uh, not the conclusion of the chinese room argument

[ImHereToVote]

The Chinese room doesn't have a model; it has an infinite dictionary. A sufficiently large LLM isn't a dictionary, it has to contain a model of some sort.