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pixl97today at 7:19 PM1 replyview on HN

>I am going to lose it

Then I think you should check in with your favorite mental health provider before you become a danger to yourself or others.

Simply put LLMs do understand some things within their crystalized intelligence. Your anthropocentric mind may not accept this, but one day it will. As LLMs have a very short context window in relation to their stored knowledge they have very limited plastic intelligence to change their minds or adapt. All of which is flushed away at the end of a session. It would be like living without the ability to turn your short term memory into new long term memories.

I would gladly use another word for what LLMs can do, but the world at large has not adopted any. The definitions we use around intelligence, comprehension, understanding, consciousness, and sapitence have already been failing us for some time before LLMs as our scientific understanding of biology has increased over the decades as it is. I am one for more exacting definitions when they exist, but humans seem to barely understand the inner workings of our own minds, in large such words escape us.


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irishcoffeetoday at 7:32 PM

I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. "My want cookie!" The toddler has zero comprehension of what any of those words mean, but they know that saying them in that order might result in something desirable.

An LLM has zero understanding of "my", "want", or "cookie" because an LLM has no id/ego, has never felt desire, and has never eaten a cookie.

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