Comment by circuit10
3 years ago
A simple example is that you can give an LLM API documentation, or even just an example URL and response, and (if the API is simple) it will have no trouble using that in a program even if it never saw that API before
Fair enough, but isn't the API documentation already providing the solution in a way? It's an instruction manual of sorts that spells out the required usage, not an abstract concept.
Well, if does anything other than copying the input verbatim or producing nonsense, it has to parse the language, which in itself uses abstract concepts, understand the purpose of the API and what it does, and then apply it in a a new context, so I would say it’s using abstract concepts in many hidden ways that we humans take for granted because that’s what our brains are built to do.
This is very close to Searle's "Chinese room". Even as a human I don't have to understand the purpose of an API to use it based on the documentation.