Comment by discreteevent

Good examples. We don't know what human intelligence, understanding or consciousness is but we do know what all of those examples are. And we do know what an LLM is. Like you said, it's a data processing machine and we know what algorithms it uses. It's more productive to discuss it in those engineering terms because we've done plenty of data processing, statistics, control systems, curve-fitting etc. before. There's no need to make this jump to consciousness/magic except for marketing or fantasy purposes.