Re:GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about
by ma2rten on Sunday August 23, 2020 @01:51AM
(#24249863)
Right, in this context I define meaning as the relationship between symbols. Form would be how to structure a sentence (but that sentence wouldn't have to make sense).
If the parent comment was making some kind of Chinese Room argument than I think that's not very helpful for the discussion. "GPT-3 learned nothing about meaning because no computer program can do that by definition".
But I don't think they were trying to make that kind of argument as you seem to be suggesting because they said they were unsure if it learned anything about meaning.
It correctly interprets the first part of the prompt as 'farduddle ~= jump' and the second part as an instruction to generate a sentence containing farduddle, possibly utilising a corpus of existing sentences containing jump in the context of 'really fast'. But that's also a series of instructions you could imagine as a DSL a relatively simple program could parse and generate a satisfactory response to. Which I believe the OP is classing as 'structure' since it's just performing translations based on familiar syntax. Understanding the concept of 'jumping' is a step further, before we get into the more philosophical stuff about qualia and whether things that can't jump can ever truly understand the experience of jumping...