Mind the AI Gap: Understanding vs. Knowing

(Updated in July, 2025)

Gorkem Turgut (G.T.) Ozer

Paul College of Business and Economics

May, 2024

Opening questions

 

  1. Can LLMs help us identify and fill our knowledge gaps?
  2. Do LLMs think and understand?
    • What does it mean to understand?
    • What does it take to understand?
  3. How can LLMs help us understand topics and acquire new skills, and move beyond mere knowledge and execution?

Deductive reasoning with GPT-4o (or lack thereof)7

* GPT fails in a basic deductive reasoning task. Click on the images to zoom in.

Deductive reasoning with GPT-o1 (or lack thereof)8

* GPT fails in a basic deductive reasoning task. Click on the images to zoom in.

Opening questions revisited

 

  1. Can LLMs help us fill our knowledge gaps? Absolutely.9
  2. Do LLMs think and understand? No evidence for it yet.
    • What does it mean to understand? To infer causality.
    • What does it take to understand? To be able to reason.
  3. How can LLMs help us understand topics and acquire new skills, and move beyond mere knowledge and execution?

Closing questions

  1. Can I help you understand something without having understood it myself? In what ways and to what extent?
  2. How would you interact with me to accomplish this goal?

By analogy:

  1. How can we use LLMs to help us understand topics and acquire new skills, and go beyond just knowing them?

  2. How can we avoid the illusion that LLMs understand, and prevent ourselves from offloading our cognitive effort?

Footnotes

  1. Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417-424.

  2. Anderson, D. L., Stufflebeam, R., & Cox, K. (2018). Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. Illinois State University.

  3. Christian, James Lee. 1990. Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

  4. Feynman, R. P. (1988). What Do You Care What Other People Think? W. W. Norton & Company.

  5. Kant, I. (1908). Critique of pure reason. 1781. Modern Classical Philosophers, Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 370-456.

  6. Van Hoeck, N., Watson, P. D., & Barbey, A. K. (2015). Cognitive neuroscience of human counterfactual reasoning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 420.

  7. Queries were executed using gpt-4o-2024-05-13 on May 22, 2024. Sample query adapted from Jingjing Li and Reza Mousavi.

  8. Queries were executed using gpt-o1-preview on September 13, 2024.

  9. This does not imply unbiased or complete knowledge. The issues of bias and ethics are outside the scope of this discussion.