The people here reading GPT-3's output and dismissing it as "not really understanding anything" or "pushing symbols without conscious intent" because of minor s

The people here reading GPT-3's output and dismissing it as "not really understanding anything" or "pushing symbols without conscious intent" because of minor slips in coherence have remarkably high standards for understanding. On a high school essay prompt, GPT-3 produces more accurate and more coherent output than 90% of high school students. If the commenters' standards were actually used consistently, they would also apply to almost all human beings. Another interestingly common objection is "we think in terms of meaningful semantics, but GPT-3 only calculates meaningless coefficients". This is a category error masquerading as an argument, equivalent to saying "I have moral worth because I'm made of cells, but you don't because you're only made of quarks." Cells and quarks are just two different-level descriptions of precisely the same thing. Understanding in your brain can be reduced to the calculation of "meaningless" coefficients just as surely as cells can be reduced to quarks.