I DISAGREE with the author's certainty. Consider a modified question: Can artificial agents that incorporate trillion-parameter NLP models learn to understand

I DISAGREE with the author's certainty. Consider a modified question: Can artificial agents that incorporate trillion-parameter NLP models learn to understand natural language in order to perform a wide range of useful tasks in open-ended environments? It sure seems possible to me, at least judging by recent progress in both reinforcement learning in open-ended environments (e.g., DeepMind's recent paper on open-ended self-play) and NLP (e.g., with models such as DALL-E and GPT-3, which are trained to learn only a very narrow set of simple tasks, but could be trained in service of more complex and diverse agent objectives). At a minimum, I'd say no one today can answer the NLU question with such certainty.