[fc417fc802]

The distinction you're making reads like substance dualism to me. Are you able to provide a clear and objective metric for assessing "understanding"? If not then you're just handwaving an effectively meaningless semantic distinction.

[qsera]

>objective metric for assessing "understanding"

It should involve consciousness. You would not call an AI reacting to red color as "seeing" red. Same thing.

[fc417fc802]

And where is this objective metric for consciousness? Last I checked we didn't even have a sensible definition for it.

It seems to me you're just kicking the can.

Setting that issue aside. While I certainly don't believe LLMs to be conscious (an entirely subjective and arbitrary take on my part I admit) I don't see any reason that concepts such as "intelligence" and "understanding" should require it. When considering how we apply those terms to humans it seems to me they are results based and highly contextual (ie largely arbitrary).

[qsera]

>humans it seems to me they are results based and highly contextual (ie largely arbitrary).

Is that right? It seems that we generally say that "the computer is programmed to do", instead of "the computer understand" or "the computer knows", even if the programmed computer can produce the same result as a human who does it.

[fc417fc802]

Of course we don't say that. You can't ask the (traditionally) programmed computer a freeform question and get a sensible answer back. We tried that for going on 50 years and it never really worked. (The highest achievement that comes to mind is answering jeopardy questions.)

You can very carefully construct a query in a dedicated language, debug that query, and get useful results back. But that's clearly just a human using a tool, not a machine exhibiting understanding or general knowledge.

Meanwhile you can ask a multi-billion parameter LLM a freeform question in ~any human language and it can produce a coherent and meaningful response. It can one shot pieces of code. Track down bugs based on compiler error messages. It might not (yet) be human level in many cases but to get hung up on that is to miss the point.

[qsera]

>multi-billion parameter LLM

This is equivalent to an `if` statement with multi-billion levels of nesting. It is just a "traditional program", just unimaginably huge.

Just because it is not "traditionally programmed" does not mean that it is not a really huge "traditional program".

Scaling something by many order of magnitude does not put it in a different category. A computer program, no matter how big, is still a computer program.

[fc417fc802]

No, it's not equivalent to nested if statements. If you can mathematically demonstrate that it is I would be interested.

Anyway that's irrelevant. The point is that we use different language when referring to the one because its capabilities appear to be fundamentally different.

Your argument comes down to a claim of human exceptionalism - that a computer program can never "understand" simply by virtue of being a computer program. You haven't actually provided any defense of that claim though. You've just assumed it without justification.

[basch]

Language models aren’t “programmed” though.

[qsera]

You are right, it is worse.

It is generated by tweaking a bunch of `if` statements until the output starts to look about right.

[basch]

If I “convey understanding” I transfer it from one person to another. Consciousness does not transfer with understanding.

Some people argue that consciousness emerges in early childhood. I can get an infant to understand what I am saying even if they aren’t conscious.