As a cognitive scientist, I think there's nothing special about the ability to "understand", or about "intelligence". When I hear someone say "AI can't understa

As a cognitive scientist, I think there's nothing special about the ability to "understand", or about "intelligence". When I hear someone say "AI can't understand", I think they mean "AI does not have a soul", and I think they actually want to say "I can't emphasize with AI". On the other hand, I think understanding is gradual, not a binary. If I teach a neural network what the letter "A" looks like, it will understand the general shape of the letter "A" and even generalize to unseen examples! That's a remarkable amount of understanding for some chunk of metal. I wouldn't say LLMs understand the world anything like we do, but they do understand something: what kind of text a human would write. That is, LLMs can work with the concept of "gravity", but do not have access to gravity. So in my view, LLMs have conceptual, abstract understanding of text but they lack grounding in physical reality. But also it doesn't really matter whether we say they "understand". What would it change?