Comment by Deb Roy

One can reasonably debate what genuine understanding consists in, and LLMs are obviously constructed differently from human minds. But the question here is not whether these systems understand as humans do. Airplanes really fly, even though they do not flap their wings like birds; what matters is not how flight is achieved but that it is achieved. Likewise, LLMs now demonstrably achieve forms of linguistic competence that match or exceed human performance across many domains.