DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course
(www.theregister.com)
I think understanding requires knowledge, and LLMs work with statistics around text, not knowledge.
With billions of dollars pumped into these companies and enough server farms crawling to make a data hoarder green with envy, they've reached a point where it seems like they know things. They've incorporated, in some capacity, that some things are true, and some are related. They understand.
That is not the case. Ask me a thousand times the solution of a math problem, and a thousand times I'll give you the same solution. Ask an LLM about a math problem, and you'll get different strategies, different rules, and different answers, often incorrect. Same thing with coding. Back away a little, and you could even apply that to any task with reasoning.
But you don't need to go that far: ask an LLM about anything without sufficient resources on the internet to absorb, and it'll just make things up. Because an LLM has no concept of knowing, it also has no concept of not knowing. It knows anything about as well as your smartphone keyboard. It's autocomplete on steroids.
So let's say they understand—they contain information about—the statistical relations between tokens. That's not the same as understanding what those tokens actually mean, and the proof of that is how much basic stuff LLMs get wrong, all the time. The information they hold is about the tokens themselves, not about the real world things those tokens represent.
At this point, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that insisting LLMs understand anything is a discussion more related to the meaning of words than to current AI capabilities. In fact, since understanding is more closely associated with knowledge that you can reason with and about, the continuous use of this word in these discussions can actually be harmful by misleading people who don't know better.
This is a timely reminder and informative for people who want to seem smug I guess?
Thanks for assuming good faith, I suppose.
I mean, have you used them?
I have, in fact, used multiple popular LLM models currently available, including paid offerings, and spent way too much time hearing both people who know about this subject and people who don't. I can safely say LLMs don't understand anything. At all.
How can you say they don't understand anything?
See above.