Nothing you say convinces me that GPT-3 is exhibiting any conceptual understanding.
Imitating existing texts better is not conceptual understanding.
"Understanding" means you can explain why you made a decision. It means there exists a model with conceptual entities that you can access and make available to others.
What GPT-3 does is this: "I am given many answers to similar questions, and I build up a huge model that reflects these answers. If I'm given a new question, I come up with a response that's probably right, based on the previous answers, but there's no explanation possible."
Don't get me wrong - it's amazing! But it's not understanding anything yet.
Even humans have skills that we know but do not understand - like "walking" for most of us!
But on abstract question, we almost always have access to a complete set of reasons. "Why did you go back to the store?" "I left my bag there." "Why did you talk to that man?" "I know he's the manager, I'm a regular." "Why were you happy?" "I had my bag."
(Indeed, this is so common that people often "backdate" reasons for actions that didn't really have any reason at the time. But I digress.)
Imitating existing texts better is not conceptual understanding.
"Understanding" means you can explain why you made a decision. It means there exists a model with conceptual entities that you can access and make available to others.
What GPT-3 does is this: "I am given many answers to similar questions, and I build up a huge model that reflects these answers. If I'm given a new question, I come up with a response that's probably right, based on the previous answers, but there's no explanation possible."
Don't get me wrong - it's amazing! But it's not understanding anything yet.
Even humans have skills that we know but do not understand - like "walking" for most of us!
But on abstract question, we almost always have access to a complete set of reasons. "Why did you go back to the store?" "I left my bag there." "Why did you talk to that man?" "I know he's the manager, I'm a regular." "Why were you happy?" "I had my bag."
(Indeed, this is so common that people often "backdate" reasons for actions that didn't really have any reason at the time. But I digress.)