Melanie Mitchell will survey a debate in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community on the extent to which current AI systems can be said to "understand" language and the physical and social situations language encodes. She will describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding, hypothesize about what humanlike understanding entails, and discuss what methods can be used to fairly evaluate understanding and intelligence in AI systems.

 

References

Mitchell, M. (2023). How do we know how smart AI systems are? Science, 381(6654), adj5957.

Mitchell, M., & Krakauer, D. C. (2023). The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(13), e2215907120.

Millhouse, T., Moses, M., & Mitchell, M. (2022). Embodied, Situated, and Grounded Intelligence: Implications for AI. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.13589.