[ExI] Emily M. Bender — Language Models and Linguistics (video interview)

[Gordon Swobe]

On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 9:29 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I do not understand why you interpret it as so amazing that words alone
>> were sufficient to construct a mathematical model and graph of a house.
>> That demonstrates that GPT-4 is intelligent, but the question, as I thought
>> we understood in our last exchange, is whether it had a conscious
>> understanding of the words it used to construct the model, where
>> understanding entails holding the word meanings consciously in mind.
>>
>
> No this isn't my point. Ignore the issue of consciousness here.
>
> My point is that this shows the LLM has overcome the symbol grounding
> problem. It has somehow learned how to correctly interpret the meanings of
> the words.
>

I don't see how creating a mathematical model from words proves anything of
the sort. As one of my other detractors (Giovanni, I think) pointed out
correctly, mathematics is another form of language. How does the fact that
GPT "knows" that "one plus one equals two" can also be expressed
numerically as "1+1=2" tell us anything about the grounding problem, which
entails having access to referents outside of language?

-gts
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