[int_19h]

I think a big part problem here is that "understand X" is just a shorthand way to say "has an internal model of X" - but the degree and accuracy of said understanding depends entirely on the quality of that model.

Now there's a good reason to believe that ChatGPT does have such a model, based on the Othello experiment. But, firstly, the size of that internal model is inherently constrained by the size of the neural net, and I doubt that the limit is anywhere large enough to allow a truly accurate approximation of the real world.

And then on top of that, said model is created based on inferences from text only, which is several steps away from the original data (audiovisual, sensory etc), and one short snippet of text at a time. Some things retain meaning better in this format than others, and I think this might explain why ChatGPT and Bing are both hilariously bad at spatial navigation beyond 1-2 steps even in simple tasks.

It will be very interesting to see how this evolves as the models are scaled up and get large enough to handle things other than text.