[cultureswitch]

Are you telling me that WW1 artillery crews didn't understand ballistics? Because they were using tables.

There's no difference between doing something that works without understanding and doing the exact same thing with understanding.

[solarhexes]

You’ve decided that your definition of “understanding” is correct. Ok.

[mannykannot]

The author of the post to which you are replying seems to be defining "understanding" as merely meaning "able to do something."

[ninetyninenine]

The author of the post is saying that understanding something can't be defined because we can't even know how the human brain works. It is a black box.

The author is saying at best you can only set benchmark comparisons. We just assume all humans have the capability of understanding without even really defining the meaning of understanding. And if a machine can mimic human behavior to it must also understand.

That is literally how far we can go from a logical standpoint. It's the furthest we can go in terms of classifying things as either capable of understanding or not capable or close.

What you're not seeing is the LLM is not only mimicking human output to a high degree. It can even produce output that is superior to what humans can produce.

[mannykannot]

What the author of the post actually said - and I am quoting, to make it clear that I'm not putting my spin on someone else's opinion - was "There's no difference between doing something that works without understanding and doing the exact same thing with understanding."

[ninetyninenine]

I'm the author. To be clear. I referred to myself as "the author."

And no I did not say that. Let me be clear I did not say that there is "no difference". I said whether there is or isn't a difference we can't fully know because we can't define or know about what "understanding" is. At best we can only observe external reactions to input.

[mannykannot]

That was just about guaranteed to cause confusion, as in my reply to solarhexes, I had explicitly picked out "the author of the post to which you are replying", who is cultureswitch, not you, and that post most definitely did make the claim that "there's no difference between doing something that works without understanding and doing the exact same thing with understanding."

It does not seem that cultureswitch is an alias you are using, but even if it is, the above is unambiguously the claim I am referring to here, and no other.

As for the broader issues, we have already continued that discussion elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39503027