All this speculation about what an AI like ChatGPT can or can't do is largely unproductive and unknown. The truth is we have no idea what ChatGPT understands or

All this speculation about what an AI like ChatGPT can or can't do is largely unproductive and unknown. The truth is we have no idea what ChatGPT understands or how comparable whatever it's doing is to human understanding. There are a lot of reasons to think it's not the same, but there are also a lot of reasons to suspect that the neural net of AI's like ChatGPT are not just operating at the level of next token prediction. There's at least some good reasons to believe that through its training ChatGPT has acquired high-level models of our world such that it "understands" how to make accurate predictions. But going further, I'd argue it also seems to have learnt how to reason. For example you can ask it logical puzzles and it will often get the answer right and explain its reasoning. Some will argue that it's not "real reasoning". which could be true, but we really don't know this with any certainty. All we know with certainty is that the output in many cases appears to have some of the characteristics of reasoning and understanding. Ask yourself, does a fish "understand" how to swim? If you ask a fish to explain how it swims it couldn't do it. So a fish can swim, but a fish doesn't understand how to swim. So what does it even mean for an AI be able able read, but not understand how to read? Is it just that a fish doesn't understand how to fish like a human? Does this distinction even matter? To summarise the point I'm trying to make here, there enough gaps in our knowledge and evidence to suggest to there is likely some amount of understanding and reasoning happening and that it would be arrogant to suggest otherwise. But I suppose to more directly answer your question. ChatGPT certainly doesn't "learn" in any meaningful way from reading. AI's like ChatGPT simply doesn't have the ability to remember things, so it physically cannot learn from reading. It might understand and reason about what it reads, but it cannot learn from it. That is assuming you're talking about the implementation of the models and not the "reading" it does during its training.