Summary: The text discusses how AI, particularly transformer models, can process information and generate responses that reflect a complex understanding of concepts. While AIs lack conscious awareness, they still demonstrate a form of understanding by integrating vast amounts of data and recognizing patterns. This ability allows them to operate in sophisticated ways, mimicking human-like understanding without experiencing it.
Predicting the next token of a stupid poem about spaghetti is, in fact, silly. But predicting the next token in a sentence that describes the meaning of life, or someone’s next action they’re about to take, is world-altering. (View Highlight)
If you define understanding as “information processing across a massive context of interrelated concepts that helps something see patterns and function effectively”—modern AIs definitely have it. (View Highlight)
The only arguable part of understanding that humans have that AIs don’t seems to be the ability to consciously reflect on things. (View Highlight)
Since humans and machines are both mechanistic in nature, conscious reflection is just another type of data processing, and is not fundamentally different. (View Highlight)