[cdchn]

Do you believe that the LLM understands what it is saying and is applying the logic that you interprets from its response, or do you think its simply repeating similar patterns of words its seen associated with the question you presented it?

[danielmarkbruce]

If you take the time to build an (S?)LM yourself, you'll realize it's neither of these. "Understands" is an ill-defined term, as is "applying logic".

But a LLM is not "simply" doing anything. It's extremely complex and sophisticated. Once you go from tokens into high-dimensional embeddings... it seems these models (with enough training) figure out how all the concepts go together. I'd suggest reading the word2vec paper first, then think about how attention works. You'll come to the conclusion these things are likely to be able to beat humans at almost everything.