[fernly]

Before anyone says that example (or any of the other fluent but _completely nonsensical_ continuations in the article) shows some sort of "understanding," please explain what you would define as understanding?

I would (and I think anyone would) offer an operational definition: there is some class of questions to which this system could reply with sensible, actionable responses. Obviously the present system is not able to "understand" and answer simple arithmetic problems that a first-grader could answer instantly. Given that, would there be any point in expecting it to answer any other logical query that could be of use in one's work? (See the "medical" example in the article, about how to drink hydrochloric acid.)

The only question it appears to answer is, "given some words, what are other words that are likely to follow them in a typical blog post?" The fact that the words are syntactically correct is unimportant, when the fluent words convey no information relevant to the input.

[Rioghasarig]

> The only question it appears to answer is, "given some words, what are other words that are likely to follow them in a typical blog post?" The fact that the words are syntactically correct is unimportant, when the fluent words convey no information relevant to the input.

You say that like that's a bad things. That's literally all it's been trained to do.

[wilg]

This is a fine definition of understanding.

However, I don't understand why we're leaping to "first-grader" as a low level of intelligence. That level of general intelligence in a machine would be a monumental achievement, I would think.

I also don't understand why you think responding to arithmetic problems, via parsing natural language, while neither being designed to perform arithmetic nor trained on it directly would be "simple".

It's not fair to say the words convey "no information", they do convey information, just not information that is useful to you. There is a ton of information in the structure of the words it generates, and it is often semantically and syntactically correct, and both of those contain information.

This is clearly not particularly useful, but it does demonstrate some sort (and I would argue your sort) of understanding.

The question is not whether it understands math and language as well as a first grader, it's whether it understands anything at all.