You passed parameters to a program. The program produced output. That's it. We can agree on that much, I think.

Does "it understands" just mean "it gave me what I wanted?" If so, I think it's clear that that isn't understanding -- or proof of understanding.

Understanding is something a being has or does. And understanding isn't always correct. I'm capable of understanding. My calculator isn't. When my calculator returns a correct answer, we don't say it understood me -- or that it understands anything. And when we say I'm wrong, we mean something different from what we mean when we say a calculator is wrong.

When I say LLMs can't understand, I'm saying it's no different from a calculator, WinZip when it unzips an archive, or a binary search algorithm when you invoke a binary-search function. The LLM, the device, the program, and the function boil down (or can) to the same primitives and the same instruction set. If LLMs have understanding, so do a calculator, WinZip, and a binary-search algorithm -- whether or not they give us the output we want.

I don't see any reason for us to suppose any of those things have or do something we should call understanding.

If "it understands" is just shorthand for "the statistical model and program were designed and tuned in such a way that my input produced the desired output," then "understand" is just the wrong word. And I'd argue that this kind of shorthand is dangerous, because it quickly stops being shorthand and becomes literal and definitional.

When we avoid loaded, suggestive language, I think the output of these programs looks different and becomes a lot less impressive. It becomes easier to see that they're basically autocorrect on steroids -- which is another way of saying they're just very big and, in one way or another, very expensive.