I watch a lot of video interviews on hinton I can assure you that “not understanding” is 100 percent his opinion both from the perspective of the actual events that occurred and as someone who knows his general stance from watching tons of interviews and videos about him.
So let me be frank with you. There are people smarter than you and more eminent than you who think you are utterly and completely wrong. Hinton is one of those people. Hopefully that can kick start the way you think into actually holding a more nuanced world view such that you realize that nobody really understands LLMs.
Half the claims on HN are borderline religious. Made up by people who unconsciously scaffold evidence to support the most convenient view.
If we understood AI completely and utterly we would be able to set those weights in a neural net into values that give us complete and total control over how the neural net behaves. This is literally our objective as human beings who created the neural net. We want to do this and we absolutely know that their exists a configuration of weights in reality that can help us achieve this goal that we want so much.
Why haven’t we just reached this goal? Because we literally don’t understand how to reach this goal even though we know it exists. We. Don’t. Understand. It is literally the only conclusion that follows given our limited ability to control LLMs. Any other conclusion is ludicrous and a sign that your logical thought process is not crystal clear.
"We don’t even know how LLMs work. "
In your retelling, an exaggeration which rightfully led to pushback.
Aside from that I don't know what conversation you think we are having.
That isn't what Hinton said in the first link. He says essentially:
People don't understand A so they think B.
But actually the truth is C.
This folksy turn of phrase is about a group of "people" who are less knowledgeable about the technology and have misconceptions.
Maybe he said something more on point in the second link, but your haphazard use of urls doesn't make me want to read on.