And yet It Understands
For me, the strongest argument in this article is “There is a point where <i>it understands</i> is the most parsimonious explanation, and we have clearly passed it”.<p>Those who deny that ChatGPT <i>understands</i> have to move their goalposts every few weeks; OpenAI’s release schedule seems to be slightly faster, so in time it seems even the fastest-moving goalposts will be outrun by the LLMs.<p>One specific flavor of “ChatGPT doesn’t <i>understand</i> things” I see here and elsewhere - no straw man intended - is that humans completing a language task are doing something fundamentally different than LLMs completing the same language task. To take the example from the article and a comment about it in this thread: if a human were to apply English instructions to a question asked in Chinese, the human is <i>understanding</i> the instructions to achieve that. If an LLM were to apply English instructions to a question asked in Chinese, that is because words across languages with similar meanings are tightly connected in its statistical model, so instructions that affect the English words will also affect the Chinese words, purely through statistical means.<p>This is certainly a more sophisticated and nuanced and believable rebuttal than the crude “mere regurgitation” response. But it’s just as dangerous. In the end, the only thing that’s ‘uniquely human’ is <i>being human</i>, everything else is outputs from a black box. Arguments that ‘what’s inside the black box matters’ are risky, because the outputs gradually converge to complete indistinguishability; there’s no bright line to step off that train, you’ll end up claiming <i>only humans can understand because understanding is a thing only humans can do</i> - or worse (as the article describes) denying your own ability to understand, because your brain is a flesh-instantiated statistical approximator of the Platonic <i>understanding</i> process, and the silicon-instantiated statistical approximator of the Platonic <i>understanding</i> process that cannot be allowed to claim to <i>understand</i> differs only in its medium of instantiation.