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Notes -
This to me seems like a pretty shallow explanation of understanding and the same criticism can be applied also to humans. According to some people like Scott Alexander, human brain is "just" a multi-layer prediction machine. It seems that the feeling of understanding itself is nothing extra special, some people on drugs like LSD feel as if they cracked the code and now understand the whole universe and their place in it. In practice understanding can be viewed as ability to give correct output given an input. We do not have access to many other methods, that is why we use tests to see if students understand things they learned.
Additionally I do not think that saying that the LLM doesn't understand the content of the query or its response the way you or I do. is that much reassuring. Quite to the contrary - LLMs give correct answer to very large set of problems and yet obviously they came to that place using completely different approach compared to humans. This makes them more alien, more inscrutable and thus more dangerous in my eyes.
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