For one thing, LLMs absolutely form responses from conceptual meanings. This has been demonstrated empirically multiple times now including again by anthropic only a few weeks ago. 'Language' is just the input and output, the first and last few layers of the model.
So okay, there exists some set of 'gibberish' tokens that will elicit meaningful responses from LLMs. How does your conclusion - "Therefore, LLMs don't understand" fit the bill here? You would also conclude that humans have no understanding of what they see because of the Rorschach test ?
>There exists no similar set of tokens for humans, because our process is to parse the incoming sounds into words, use grammar to extract conceptual meaning from those words, and then shape a response from that conceptual meaning.
Grammar is useful fiction, an incomplete model of a demonstrably probabilistic process. We don't use 'grammar' to do anything.
For one thing, LLMs absolutely form responses from conceptual meanings. This has been demonstrated empirically multiple times now including again by anthropic only a few weeks ago. 'Language' is just the input and output, the first and last few layers of the model.
So okay, there exists some set of 'gibberish' tokens that will elicit meaningful responses from LLMs. How does your conclusion - "Therefore, LLMs don't understand" fit the bill here? You would also conclude that humans have no understanding of what they see because of the Rorschach test ?
>There exists no similar set of tokens for humans, because our process is to parse the incoming sounds into words, use grammar to extract conceptual meaning from those words, and then shape a response from that conceptual meaning.
Grammar is useful fiction, an incomplete model of a demonstrably probabilistic process. We don't use 'grammar' to do anything.