your analogy is actually quite good.
Yeah, this is actually something I’ve been thinking about too.
I don’t think it’s as simple as “LLMs just see tokens”, because clearly something much richer is happening inside those representations.
But at the same time, good answers ≠ actual understanding.
A model can be incredibly good at connecting patterns, reasoning through language and giving an answer that sounds completely convincing, while still not having the same kind of grounded understanding we mean when a human actually knows something.
So I guess the question I keep coming back to is:
When does pattern recognition become understanding?
And honestly, I don’t think we have a clean answer yet. 👀