@ct_bergstrom @emilymbender Interesting thought experiment very similar to Searle’s Chinese Room. As far as I understand that without studying it deeply, aren’t the “unlimited time”, our limitations wrt memory, and our own expectation of frustration doing too much work here?

@ct_bergstrom @emilymbender I think I get where you, Emily, are going with this, but even the question of “understanding” in a non-functional way is anthropomorphizing LLMs. It only makes sense when we try in a second step to map our knowledge about Thai signs to our existing memory of the world. But this question actually never arises for LLMs. So the only way they can understand the world is by reacting in a “right” way to inputs. But aren’t we, too?