>If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do.
A language model completes text based on the overlapping patterns of the training data.
There absolutely was thinking involved… in the training data. Same as when you read a book, you engage with the thinking behind the text. The book isn’t thinking, and the author may be dead and gone, but there’s absolutely the traces of thinking in the text.
Language models produce mashups of texts they were trained on, and there’s absolutely the traces of thoughts behind those mashups.