[kenjackson]

> that is, mapping words to abstract concepts, operating on those concepts, and then translating concepts back into words

I feel like DNNs do this today. At higher levels of the network they create abstractions and then the eventual output maps them to something. What you describe seems evolutionary, rather than revolutionary to me. This feels more like we finally discovered booster rockets, but still aren't able to fully get out of the atmosphere.

[beepbooptheory]

They might have their own semantics, but its not our semantics! The written word already can only approximate our human experience, and now this is an approximation of an approximation. Perhaps if we were born as writing animals instead of talking ones...

[kenjackson]

This is true, but I think this feels evolutionary. We need to train models using all of the inputs that we have... touch, sight, sound, smell. But I think if we did do that, they'd be eerily close to us.