Comment by lostmsu
8 hours ago
> I remember the guy saying that disembodied AI couldn’t possibly understand meaning.
This is not a theory (or is one, but false) according to Popper as far as I understand, because the only way to check understanding that I know of is to ask questions, and LLMs passes it. So in order to satisfy falsifiability another test must be devised.
I think the claim would be that an LLM would only ever pass a strict subset of the questions testing a particular understanding. As we gather more and more text to feed these models, finding those questions will necessarily require more and more out-of-the-box thinking... or a (un)lucky draw. Giveaways will always be lurking just beyond the inference horizon, ready to yet again deflate our high hopes of having finally created a machine which actually understands our everyday world.
I find this thesis very plausible. LLMs inhabit the world of language, not our human everyday world, so their understanding of it will always be second-hand. An approximation of our own understanding of that world, itself imperfect, but at least aiming for the real thing.
The part about overcoming this limitation by instantiating the system in hardware I find less convincing, but I think I know where he comes from with that as well: by giving it hardware sensors, the machine would not have to simulate the world outside as well - on top of the inner one.
The inner world can more easily be imagined as finite, at least. Many people seem to take this as a given, actually, but there's no good reason to expect that it is. Plank limits from QM are often brought up as an argument for digital physics, but in fact they are only a limit on our knowledge of the world, not on the physical systems themselves.