Yeah, I think coming up with definitions of "understanding" or "reasoning" that GPT-4 and friends supposedly don't fulfill is moving goalposts.
To continue your line of thinking, when we add salt and pepper to a dish we've cooked, are we really doing it because we have a developed a thorough understanding of the human olfactory and gustatory systems [1] system, or because it tasted good previously when applied to similar recipes?
And when it comes to understanding basic math, perhaps the patterns are still a tad to complicated for LLMs. Maybe there are too many surprising rules that appear out of nowhere and break the learnt patterns. But children struggle with those rules as well when they first come across them. Think about division through zero - when coming across the rule for the first time, you might wonder why it exists, instead of e.g. defining the result to be infinity. The answer to that question (not just "because that's the way things work!") is not obvious at all, to be honest I wouldn't be confident enough to attempt giving an explanation here.
[1] I have to admit I had to look gustatory system up: it's the biological term for the system behind the sense of taste.
> ...admit I had to look gustatory system up: it's the biological term for the system behind the sense of taste.
Ah, that must be why I consume pies with gusto. Yup, Wiktionary confirms: "Borrowed from Italian gusto, from Latin gustus (“tasting”). Doublet of cost."
To continue your line of thinking, when we add salt and pepper to a dish we've cooked, are we really doing it because we have a developed a thorough understanding of the human olfactory and gustatory systems [1] system, or because it tasted good previously when applied to similar recipes?
And when it comes to understanding basic math, perhaps the patterns are still a tad to complicated for LLMs. Maybe there are too many surprising rules that appear out of nowhere and break the learnt patterns. But children struggle with those rules as well when they first come across them. Think about division through zero - when coming across the rule for the first time, you might wonder why it exists, instead of e.g. defining the result to be infinity. The answer to that question (not just "because that's the way things work!") is not obvious at all, to be honest I wouldn't be confident enough to attempt giving an explanation here.
[1] I have to admit I had to look gustatory system up: it's the biological term for the system behind the sense of taste.