> But to me it seems obvious that LLMs are not repeating patterns without comprehension and do understand what they are saying; otherwise they would not be capable of doing things they routinely do.

So this seems obvious to you, and yet to many others, it is equally obvious that LLMs can/could do the things they routinely do without any meaningful sense of "understanding".

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naasking an hour ago | parent [-]

I think it's a mistake to disentangle their abilities from understanding. Just swallow the pill that they have some form of understanding, even if it slightly differs from ours. I really don't see the problem.

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I prefer to work the other way around. That is, accept that a lot of human speech (and text) is generated via similar mechanisms to the ones that drive LLMs, but note that there is another kind of behavior - reasoning - which seems to be distinct.