Technology
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No, you're wrong. All interesting behavior of ML models is emergent. It is learned, not programmed. The fact that it can perform what we consider an abstract task with success clearly distinguishable from random chance is irrefutable proof that some model of the task has been learned.
No one said anyhting about "learned" vs "programmed". Literally no one.
OP is saying it's impossible for a LLM to have "figured out" how something it works, and that if it understood anything it would be able to perform related tasks perfectly reliably. They didn't use the words, but that's what they meant. Sorry for your reading comprehension.
"op" you are referring to is... well... myself, Since you didn't comprehend that from the posts above, my reading comprehension might not be the issue here. \
But in all seriousness: I think this is an issue with concepts. No one is saying that LLMs can't "learn" that would be stupid. But the discussion is not "is everything programmed into the LLM or does it recombine stuff". You seem to reason that when someone says the LLM can't "understand", that person means "the LLM can't learn", but "learning" and "understanding" are not the same at all. The question is not if LLMs can learn, It's wether it can grasp concepts from the content of the words it absorbs as it it's learning data. If it would grasp concepts (like rules in algebra), it could reproduce them everytime it gets confronted with a similar problem. The fact that it can't do that shows that the only thing it does is chain words together by stochastic calculation. Really sophisticated stachastic calculation with lots of possible outcomes, but still.
I don't care. It doesn't matter, so I didn't check. Your reading comprehension is still, in fact, the issue, since you didn't understand that the "learned" vs "programmed" distinction I had referred to is completely relevant to your post.
That's what learning is. The fact that it can construct syntactically and semantically correct, relevant responses in perfect English means that it has a highly developed inner model of many things we would consider to be abstract concepts (like the syntax of the English language).
This is wrong. It is obvious and irrefutable that it models sophisticated approximations of abstract concepts. Humans are literally no different. Humans who consider themselves to understand a concept can obviously misunderstand some aspect of the concept in some contexts. The fact that these models are not as robust as that of a human's doesn't mean what you're saying it means.
This is a meaningless point, you're thinking at the wrong level of abstraction. This argument is equivalent to "a computer cannot convey meaningful information to a human because it simply activates and deactivates bits according to simple rules." Your statement about an implementation detail says literally nothing about the emergent behavior we're talking about.