CNN are finding patterns, sometimes relevant, sometimes spurious, but I don't think people argue that CNN have evolved consciousness or understanding of what a cat or a dog is.
Here, the argument is "LLM are able to understand, because 'understanding' is the only pattern to reach the goal". I'm saying that it is unlikely to be the only pattern, and that it is likely that they find a local minimum on a system that reaches the goal that does not use 'understanding'.
The reason I'm saying it is likely is because "basic" LLM shows behaviours where they are producing convincing human text and yet doing things that are really difficult to reconciliate with the fact that they have understanding.
(And before that old argument is used, yes, I know sometimes some humans fail to understand. The problem is that the majority of humans don't fail to understand basic stuff in the majority of the time, while the "basic" LLMs do. The fact that you roll 10 dices 100 times and 1 of them never land on 1 does not convince me that that set of dice is loaded. The fact that you roll 10 dices 100 times and 9 of them never land on 1 does convince me that that set of dice is loaded.)
That reminds me of a niche paper [0] critiquing a certain way of teaching remedial math that was over-focused on tests. A kid named Benny (12) was building up (wrong) "rules" for math which still somehow gave enough of an illusion of progress in terms of test scores that his misunderstandings hadn't been caught earlier.
> Benny was able to explain his procedure; e.g. for 5/10=1.5, he said: "The one stands for 10; the decimal; then there’s 5... shows how many ones." In another example, 400/400 = 8.00 because "The numbers are the same [number of digits]... say like 4000 over 5000. All you do is add them up; put the answer down; then put your decimal in the right place... in front of the [last] three numbers."