Research community is definitely not agreed on this, and there are a number of different camps. Broadly, 2 perspectives from the NLP community: The 2020 Bender

Research community is definitely not agreed on this, and there are a number of different camps. Broadly, 2 perspectives from the NLP community: The 2020 Bender and Koller paper[1] that argues that meaning is not learnable from form, and LLMs are trained on form. They propose a thought experiment ("The Octopus Test" section of the paper) featuring an octopus that can intercept the conversation two humans are having, but "having only form available as training data, [the Octopus] did not learn meaning." And a contradicting response from Yoav Goldberg (another NLP researcher)[2] with a much more informal discussion of "groundedness" and what LLMs learn. His argument is broadly that instruction tuning + post-training can meaningfully grounds terms like "summarize" etc. [1] https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463/ https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463/ [2] https://gist.github.com/yoavg/59d174608e92e845c8994ac2e234c8a9 https://gist.github.com/yoavg/59d174608e92e845c8994ac2e234c8...