Certainly consciousness and understand are central to Searle’s argument. However from my perspective (particularly someone who is critical of all the recent DNN advances as being some harbinger of AGI), if all you’re doing is looking up replies from a dictionary, then you have no capacity to generalize, learn new things, adapt, empathize, have memory that isn’t already pre-computed and pre-allocated.

Now there are ways in which thru fine tuning etc that you can take GPT-3 and have it adapt in some way, thru such adaption or “context/attention networks” give it “memory,” in practice neither of these looks anything like AGI because right now these pages of this Chinese dictionary don’t have any relationship to each other. It becomes clear both in this article (you shouldn’t need some “correct” prompt to get it to make sense), and clear with long form generation that there isn’t a deeper understanding of the meaning of these words. I will say it’s very impressive what it can do when it does make sense, shockingly so, but we are very much in the position where we didn’t expect “chinese” to come out of the machine at all and thus we are projecting onto its outputs an anthropomorphisis that is unwarranted.