ryanheise wrote:[So When we say that ChatGPT doesn't really "understand", we would mean that in the "human" sense, but there is still a sense in which ChatGPT does "understand". Because in computer science, there is a field of study known as natural language understanding. When you look at the progress that has been made in machine translation, the oldest translation models simply did a literal word-for-word translation without understanding the overall meaning of the sentence, and so it would get things very wrong. What has allowed these translation systems to get better is precisely that they have become better at understanding the overall meaning of the sentence, and even beyond that, the overall context of the sentence within the larger piece of text that it appeared. Or take something even much simpler than that: Before we even started building machine learning models for this sort of stuff, early systems like UNIX came up with a command-line interface that was capable of understanding basic commands. It's not human understanding, but it is a kind of understanding that doesn't include consciousness as a component.
I'd contend that it doesn't understand in any real sense. The redefining of words to meet a certain concept of understanding is not really legitimate. The idea being touted is a challenge or perhaps meeting human understanding. At this point I would posit a cat or a dog or a crow or any actually intelligent animal as a better candidate. Not just something turning out creditable essays from having the computing power to sift through millions of examples. These are the effects, the products of intelligence and understanding, not the thing itself.
When we pit a mere electronic calculator against the average person, the latter's failure to understand a particular equation and the calculator's operational capability of solving one quickly is not 'understanding' for the calculator. It's like a bolt fitting into a nut, it was specifically designed to that end. The ability for a human to finally 'grasp' something without having their head opened and the neurons rearranged into a more receptive arrangement for the problem at hand, really is 'understanding'.