He's pointing at the gap between understanding and non-understanding. A phone autocomplete (or a small language model) is like a monkey on a typewriter - it can stumble into a meaningful sentence, effectively at random. But scale it up enough (???), and something resembling understanding and coherence emerges.

What's happening? Is it magic? Is it an illusion?

Could you be conflating writing hamlet with understanding how to write hamlet? as in, what it takes to end up with the same raw output though devoid of intent and meaning

To be fair, I didn't watch the video to the part where he mentions monkeys writing Hamlet, but I thought the point of the monkeys is that they will stumble upon a Hamlet by accident at some point in time, by randomly pressing buttons on a keyboard. Obviously, it would take a long time, but it would happen at some point.

> Obviously, it would take a long time, but it would happen at some point.

Has someone done the calculation whether it would happen before the end of the universe?

It would involve multiple, multiple universes (but not infinite) coming and going. Even with infinite monkeys.

He doesn’t say quadratic time, he says infinite time. He is talking about the probability of any given string arising from a random sequence of letters. As t goes to infinity that probability approaches 1.

The monkeys don’t understand hamlet. They just bash enough keys that it appears by chance (eventually). Hence “‘It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times…’ Stupid monkey. “

Here's something to ponder. Assuming the Riemann Hypothesis is true, would that monkey type out a proof of the RH before it got to Hamlet? I guess it depends on if the proof can be expressed in fewer words than the word count of Hamlet.

"The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem