One question for David Krakauer, president of the Sante Fe Institute for complexity science where he explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth.
Does GPT-4 really understand what we’re saying?
Yes and no, is the answer to that. In my new paper with computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, we surveyed AI researchers on the idea that large pretrained language models, like GPT-4, can understand language. When they say these models understand us, or that they don’t, it’s not clear that we’re agreeing on our concept of understanding. When Claude Shannon was inventing information theory, he made it very clear that the part of information he was interested in was communication, not meaning: You can have two messages that are equally informative, with one having loads of meaning and the other none.
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