What does it matter if they have understanding of the underlying language or not? Heck, do humans even have the "understanding of the underlying language". What does that even mean?

It's a model. It either predicts usefully or not. How it works is mostly irrelevant.

Defining what that means exactly is one endeavor. But it's important to the how, because whatever it may mean implies a drastically limited set of capabilities, a ceiling, etc., compared to whatever it may mean - if it weren't the case.

interesting take. i dont know a lot about grammarz yet in my own language i can speak fairly ok...

all i know about these LLMs is that even if they understand language or can create it, they know nothing of the subjects they speak of.

copilot told me to cast an int to str to get rid of an error.

thanks copilot, it was on kernel code.

glad i didnt do it :/. just closed browser and opened man pages. i get nowhere with these things. it feels u need to understand so much its likely less typing to write the code. code is concise and clear after all, mostly unambiguous. language on the other hand...

i do like it as a bit of a glorified google, but looking at what code it outputs my confidence it its findings lessens every prompt

I think that more often than we'd like to admit, we humans are also just not thinking that much about or understanding what we are communicating, and just outputting the statistically most likely next word over and over.

Without understanding you can’t have creativity or fix mistakes. It matters a lot.

Nobody knows what intelligence is, yet somehow everyone has a strong opinion on what it isn't; after all, how could piecewise affine transformations/markov chains/differential equations EVER do X?

In which case...what good is a model that predicts semi-randomly? Oh.

("But it works - when it works" is a tautology, not a useful model)