[naasking]

> The child knows how to catch the ball, without understanding.

I disagree that decoupling "knowing" from "understanding" is well motivated or useful in any way.

> I don't think that it is useful to say that LLMs understand anything they say, or that we say to them.

This is starting to seem like a Chinese Room disagreement, so I'll just say that what that thought experiment demonstrated is that there is no robust or meaningful way to distinguish semantics from syntactic processing given everything we know about reality, and that LLMs were a fantastic demonstration of this illusion, eg. that "semantics" are reducible to a relational network of syntactic elements.