But the machines don't understand. They predict. And what they predict is the next token. I'm not trying to beat this horse to death, but you have to realize using the word "understand" is anthropomorphising it. It's essentially the chinese room experiment -- if the rules are followed, no understanding is neccessary.
If the tokens didn't correlate to words imbued with meaning outside the system, if the LLMs were trained on patterned data that had no meaning to humans or something there wouldn't be any conversation about these things being conscious at all.
If the tokens didn't correlate to words imbued with meaning outside the system, if the LLMs were trained on patterned data that had no meaning to humans or something there wouldn't be any conversation about these things being conscious at all.