(Updated in July, 2025)
Paul College of Business and Economics
May, 2024
Input:
This question in Chinese means “What brings happiness?”
Output:
The answer is in red:
“Be the stream of the universe!” (from Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching)
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― A. Einstein3
“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” ― R. Feynman4
is a hallmark of human thought, enabling the capacity to shift from perceiving the immediate environment to an alternative, imagined perspective. Mental representations of counterfactual possibilities (e.g., imagined past events or future outcomes not yet at hand) provide the basis for learning from past experience, enable planning and prediction, support creativity and insight, and give rise to emotions and social attributions (e.g., regret and blame).6
* GPT fails in a basic deductive reasoning task. Click on the images to zoom in.
* GPT fails in a basic deductive reasoning task. Click on the images to zoom in.
By analogy:
How can we use LLMs to help us understand topics and acquire new skills, and go beyond just knowing them?
How can we avoid the illusion that LLMs understand, and prevent ourselves from offloading our cognitive effort?
Treating LLMs as knowledge aggregators (vs. infallible oracles) can help us move from knowing to understanding by taking control of our learning.
Treat LLM agents as assistants who need guidance to think and reason. Think of a solution first and ask the agent to help you with the steps of the solution. The agent may come up with alternative solutions, and that’s fine.
Mind the AI Gap: Understanding vs. Knowing (and Doing!)
Gorkem Turgut (G.T.) Ozer - May, 2024
(Updated in July, 2025)
Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417-424.
Anderson, D. L., Stufflebeam, R., & Cox, K. (2018). Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. Illinois State University.
Christian, James Lee. 1990. Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Feynman, R. P. (1988). What Do You Care What Other People Think? W. W. Norton & Company.
Kant, I. (1908). Critique of pure reason. 1781. Modern Classical Philosophers, Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 370-456.
Van Hoeck, N., Watson, P. D., & Barbey, A. K. (2015). Cognitive neuroscience of human counterfactual reasoning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 420.
Queries were executed using gpt-4o-2024-05-13 on May 22, 2024. Sample query adapted from Jingjing Li and Reza Mousavi.
Queries were executed using gpt-o1-preview on September 13, 2024.
This does not imply unbiased or complete knowledge. The issues of bias and ethics are outside the scope of this discussion.