this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
583 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
81933 readers
2669 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"LLMs don’t have human understanding or metacognition"
Then what's the (auto-completing) fucking problem? It's just a series of steps on data. You could feed it white noise and it would vomit up more noise. And keep doing it as long as there's power.
Intelligent?
If it was just autocomplete in the dismissive sense, white noise should make it derail into white noise. Instead it tries to make sense of it. Why? Because it learned strong language priors from us and it leans on that when the prompt is meaningless. It tries to make sense of it.
“Not human understanding” ≠ “no reasoning-like computation.”
Those aren't the same thing.
People doing the "Fancy autocomplete” thing are doing the laziest possible move: not human, therefore nothing interesting happening. I disagree with that.
It doesn’t “understand,” like we do and it’s not infallible, but calling it “fancy autocomplete” is like calling a jet engine “fancy candle.”
Same category of thing, wildly different behavior.
No, it doesn't. You're in sci-fi land. There is no "it" "trying to make sense". That cogitation is happening in YOU, not the motherboard.
"The cogitation is happening in YOU" is just the philosophical zombie argument dressed up as a gotcha. Sure, there's no ghost in the machine - but that's true of your neurons too. Your brain is also "just" electrochemical signals on wet hardware. Does that mean your understanding is happening somewhere else?
The point isn't whether there's a homunculus sitting inside the GPU having feelings. The point is that the functional operations happening - maintaining context, resolving ambiguity, applying something structurally similar to inference across novel inputs - are more than pattern-matching in the (dismissive sense) people mean when they say "autocomplete."