[fxwin]

I think "(intelligent) language understander" is an apt term. It contains within it the fact that these models are mainly trained on text, and "understand" it beyond a simple token-by-token level (i.e. their latent space maps to more and more complex concepts).

It also separates them from "world understanders" since any understanding they might have about the world comes from text (or images if we include multimodal models). They do not gather experience, memories or other "qualia" that many people (me included) would probably include in a definition of human experience/intelligence.

(fwiw i think artificial intelligence is a good, broad term, but it is both too broad to describe the current sota, and too loaded nowadays to be using in nuanced discussions)

[xgulfie]

Understand is a pretty imprecise term. What does it mean for a computer to understand? Does an H264 decoder understand Eraserhead.mkv?

[fxwin]

Sure, but that's the nature of language (which is also why i put "understand" in quotation marks. I usually follow it up with "whatever that means" lol) . I think in this case, it carries with it implicit properties (abstract semantic representation) that i think models possess, which a decoder doesn't.