There's an interesting Google TechTalk on YouTube called "The Next Generation of Neural Networks" from 2007 [1]. In that video, there is a demo [2] that showcas

There's an interesting Google TechTalk on YouTube called "The Next Generation of Neural Networks" from 2007 [1]. In that video, there is a demo [2] that showcases the neural network recognizing numbers when given a drawing of a number as inputs, but more interesting is the follow on where the demo shows fixing the output to a given number and letting the neural network generate the "input" image to show what it is thinking that number can be. That is a strong indication to me that that particular neural network has a good understanding of what the particular number glyphs look like, even if it does not know what those are conceptually or how they relate to each other and to mathematics -- that is, that the neural network would not be able to work out what number 42 is, how it relates to 37 (i.e. 37 < 42), or how to manipulate those numbers (e.g. 2 + 7 = 9). Dall-E will likely be similar in that it is effectively doing that perception step where you fix the text description from the classifier output and run that in reverse to show what the neural network is "seeing" when it is "thinking" about that given output. So it won't be able to describe features of a giraffe, or information about where they live, etc. but it will be able to show you what it thinks they look like. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M [2] https://youtu.be/AyzOUbkUf3M?t=1293 https://youtu.be/AyzOUbkUf3M?t=1293