alt Hacker NewsI think you need understanding to reason, but you don't need reasoning to understand. A child understands how to catch a ball without reasoning about forces, air resistance, gravity, etc.
I think LLMs understand without reasoning. They've built a large associative network of concepts (a kind of understanding), but we don't yet have a good handle on the process of reasoning using that network.
I don't think it is useful to say that a child "understands how to catch a ball", even though it is something many of us do say quite often.
The child knows how to catch the ball, without understanding. Later, the child learns both reason and physics, and can reason about ball catching in a different way.
I don't think that it is useful to say that LLMs understand anything they say, or that we say to them.