Implications, Understanding & Philosophy

This session takes a more in-depth, even philosophical, perspective on what it means to actually understand something. Here, we focus on what it means to really understand language, and discuss whether LLMs can be said to understand language in the discussed senses of “understanding”.

Slides of the session can be found here.

Additional materials

If you want to dig a bit deeper, here are (optional!) supplementary readings. More papers discussed in the lecture are provided in the slides.

• Bommasani et al. (2022) On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models

• Mahowald et al. (2023) Dissociating language and thought in large language models

• Mitchell & Krakauer (2023) The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models