diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2024/06/13/llms_do_not_understand_anything.md b/website/src/content/blog/2024/06/13/llms_do_not_understand_anything.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f17735f --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2024/06/13/llms_do_not_understand_anything.md @@ -0,0 +1,82 @@ +--- +title: LLMs do not understand anything +description: >- + Save this for the next time someone tells you that LLMs 'understand' things. +pubDate: + year: 2024 + month: 06 + day: 13 +--- + +LLMs do not understand what they are talking about. They just don't. It's not +how they're built. They have a statistical model of language, not a semantic +one. Philosophical puzzles about whether silicon can be conscious +_do not arise_, because LLMs are _not even close to the right shape_ for having +_anything like_ 'understanding'. + +If you don't believe me, there are plenty of examples out there on the Internet, +but this is as good as any. It includes Chat GPT 4o explaining in detail why +\~\~A → \~A (which is a classical contradiction) is trivially true in classical +logic. + +It's even better given that I had explicitly asked it to explain why that +sentence implies the trivial logic, not why it is trivially true. And even had +the explanation not been complete garbage from beginning to end, it would only +have shown that the sentence was _true_, not that it was trivial. + +In other words, the output: + +- Attempts to prove a contradiction (unprompted!) +- Confuses the concepts 'truth' and 'triviality' +- Is irrelevant to the prompt + +In case you want it handy, I'll put the full conversation down below. The good +bit is at the end. The only edits I've made are to replace TeX syntax with +Unicode. + +