>No, you're the one who's begging the question. Why can't a "purely statistical" process have an understanding? This is a related, but fundamentally different

>No, you're the one who's begging the question. Why can't a "purely statistical" process have an understanding? This is a related, but fundamentally different thing to the point I replied to in your original comment. You asked: > I don't see how it can [apply training across languages] unless it really has some kind of understanding. I provided a potential explanation that is in line with how we think GPT works, and which doesn't require it to have understanding. You may feel that GPT is complex enough that this process itself models understanding - but I disagree, and I think that's begging the question because it falls back on a fact (GPT is highly complex) that is independent of the above problem (how GPT applied training across languages.) I am not compelled by the translation example to believe beyond doubt that GPT actually models and understands abstract concepts. I don't think the fact that its training works across languages is any proof that it parses that training in an abstract way, or that it forms abstract links between the same ideas in different languages, or indeed that it has any notions of language at all.