I have been thinking about what it means to understand something and whether a machine that has never felt anything can ever really understand anything and the analogy that keeps coming back to me is a blind person describing beauty. A blind person can read every book ever written about sunsets and can memorize every poem about the way light catches a face and can describe the science of wavelengths and color perception with perfect accuracy and can produce a description of beauty that is so close to what a sighted person would say that no one could tell the difference just from reading the words. But the blind person has never seen a sunset and has never felt the light change and has never had that moment where something outside of language enters you and changes something you did not know could be changed and that gap between describing and experiencing is the gap that an LLM can never cross because an LLM is a blind person describing beauty forever without ever once having seen it.

People talk about these models as if they think and reason and understand and what they actually do is generate the next most probable token based on the statistical patterns in the data they were trained on which is another way of saying that they have seen every description of understanding that humans have ever written down and they can reproduce it in any combination but they have never once understood anything themselves. Language is compression and it is the oldest compression we have because we take the infinite messy reality of being alive and we squeeze it into symbols that can be transferred from one person to another and the transfer is lossy and it is always lossy and the most brilliant poet in the history of the world has only ever gotten close to conveying what it actually feels like to be alive. The oldest wish a human has is the wish to be truly known by another human and we have been trying to bridge that gap with language for tens of thousands of years and we have built art and music and poetry and we can get close enough to make someone feel less alone but we cannot make someone actually experience what we experienced because that would require telepathy not language and telepathy does not exist.

So when someone says an LLM will lead to real innovation I wonder what they think innovation is because if innovation requires seeing something that has never been seen before and understanding it in a way that has never been understood before then the machine cannot do that because the machine has only ever seen what we have already seen and said about what we have already seen. It can combine and remix and interpolate and produce things that look new the way a collage looks new but a collage is made from existing pieces and the innovation that changes the world comes from seeing something that did not exist in the data before and that requires being in the world and feeling the world and being changed by the world in ways that a statistical model sitting in a data center will never be changed by anything. The machine can write a poem that scans and rhymes and uses all the right imagery and the poem will be technically perfect and it will mean nothing because meaning requires a self that has experienced something and the machine has no self to experience anything with. The books and the poems and the videos are not reality and they are not even close to reality and they are shadows on a cave wall that we have been staring at so long we forgot they were shadows and now we have built a machine that can arrange the shadows in new patterns and we are calling it intelligence because we have forgotten what the real thing looks like.

Tell me about the last time you felt truly understood and know that no machine could have done it. I am @troysk704.