That last bit about the horse is pretty loaded. Knowing what a giraffe is means knowing that it is a mammal, has a blood system, eats leaves, reacts certain ways to certain stimuli, etc... That is a lot more than just knowing what it looks like. Image recognition is not the same a relationships or knowledge.

Now ask DALL-E "giraffe feeding young", "giraffe organs", "giraffe eating", etc, I think you'd find most knowledge is there.

What about ,"giraffe laying eggs"?

By your criteria, no human before the 18th century (when Carl Linnaeus invented the class “mammalia”) knew what a giraffe was.

And in the 25th century, if we manage keep technology alive, the dall-es of the day will be trained in more computer depictions of long extinct animals that accidentally made it into the training set than pictures of real animals. It will be Dürer's rhinoceros all over again.

> mammal, has a blood system, eats leaves, reacts certain

DALL-E likely can map all those concepts to a giraffe also.

You know a lot more than that. You know that it eats, sleeps, runs, mates. You know that there are male and female giraffes and what that means. You know that it dies if it gets too hot, too cold, if it falls off a cliff. You know that it has legs, a head, neck, etc and you probably know that it has a heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, etc inside.

You know, vaguely, how it interacts with other things and what it's likely to do around a fruit tree, or a lion, or fire.

Even if you've never been close to a giraffe, you can probably imagine what it looks like from close enough to see individual hairs in its fur.

A lot of knowledge is still missing from ML systems that don't interact with the world.

It's even deeper than that. Humans and giraffes are mammals, very close cousins in terms of evolutionary biology. The very nature of your experience of reality is essentially shared with the giraffe.

Part of our brains are lizard, both yours and the giraffes. Tech so ancient that it uses the same circuits and chemicals with crustaceans.

You can imagine what existence is like for a giraffe with pretty much 99% accuracy without consciously knowing a single thing about it.

A word-based image generator cannot.

That's not a word game at all. To know what a giraffe is is to be able to understand the implications of being informed that something is a giraffe. Dalle would never assume on its own that "a giraffe close to a low flying helicopter" could be very dangerous for the giraffe, but "a horse close to a low flying helicopter" is safe.

> Dalle would never assume on its own that "a giraffe close to a low flying helicopter" could be very dangerous for the giraffe, but "a horse close to a low flying helicopter" is safe.

Are you sure? (Can someone run down those prompts?)

Dall-e might be able to make those relationships in the latent space

> Are you sure?

Considering Dall-e has problems painting "a red cube on top of a blue cube" [1] and all kind of simple spatial relations, I'd say it's a fair shot.

[1] As reported by OpenAI, but there are also some prompts by Gary Marcus et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13807) showing this, and it's trivially simple to find other very simple cases like these

Not really close to horses at all. It's an even-toed ungulate, closer to deer, cows and sheep. Many, many tens of millions of years from horses.. the even-toed herbivores are closer to dolphins (!!) than they are to horses or rhinos.

I do not grok a giraffe in the same way I do the things I work on.

What do you mean by "is"? I've spent a fair amount of time with giraffes in real life. Does that mean I know what one is?

I would really hope so. All of this conversation is devolving into a philosophical argument about 2 letter words. To know what something is relates to understanding some of its properties, and how it might interact with the world around it. Whether DALL-E knows what something is, is debatable. Whether you know what something is should be pretty clear.