Comment on OpenAI Says It's Scanning Users' ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police
iglou@programming.dev 13 hours agoThat is actually incorrect. It is also a language understanding tool. You don’t have an LLM without NLP. NLP includes processing and understanding natural language.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 13 hours ago
But it doesn’t understand - at least not in the sense humans do. When you give it a prompt, it breaks it into tokens, matches those against its training data, and generates the most statistically likely continuation. It doesn’t “know” what it’s saying, it’s just producing the next most probable output. That’s why it often fails at simple tasks like counting letters in a word - it isn’t actually reading and analyzing the word, just predicting text. In that sense it’s simulating understanding, not possessing it.
iglou@programming.dev 13 hours ago
You’re entering a more philosophical debate than a technical one, because for this point to make any sense, you’d have to define what “understanding” language means for a human in a level as low as what you’re describing for an LLM.
Can you affirm that what a human brain does to understand language is so different to what an LLM does?
I’m not saying an LLM is smart, but saying that it doesn’t understand, when having computers “understand” natural language is the core of NLP, is meh.
Feyd@programming.dev 12 hours ago
No they’re not they’re talking purely at a technical level and you’re trying to apply mysticism to it.