Language Writ Large: LLMs, ChatGPT, Grounding, Meaning and Understanding

Understand

Apart from what (little) OpenAI may be concealing from us, we all know (roughly) how ChatGPT works (its huge text database, its statistics, its vector representations, and their huge number of parameters, its next-word training, and so on).

• But none of us can say (hand on heart) that we are not surprised by what ChatGPT has proved to be able to do with these resources.
• This has even driven some of us to conclude that ChatGPT actually understands.
• It is not true that it understands.