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Steve M's avatar

I’m so glad you brought up the Chinese room!

I was thinking that it’s amazing that that argument is even more relevant than it was 40+ years ago. At the time it seemed that one of the better counter arguments to Searle’s thought experiment was that it seemed so improbable to imagine that it could function as described, and yet, here it is.

Searle wondered how you could possibly get semantics out of syntax.

Now we’ve found we can get syntax out of statistics, but still trying to find where the semantics is located.

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Stephen Bannister's avatar

Brad,

For a counter-argument (I think) to your essay, here is an extended conversation between Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) and Lex Fridman. Over 2 hours long. Lex publishes much shorter clips after the main content if you don't have the time for this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Guz73e6fw

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