AIs understand

For (7)

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  Geoffrey Hinton

  Godfather of Deep Learning

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  votes For and says:

  Suppose I say to a chatbot, I saw the Grand Canyon flying to Chicago. And the chatbot says, that can't be right. The Grand Canyon is much too big to fly to Chicago. And I say, no, no, no, it was me flying to Chicago. While I was flying to Chicago, I ...

  more AI Verified source (Jun 3, 2026)

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  Bertrand Meyer

  Computer scientist and software engineering professor

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  votes For and says:

  With recent progress in LLMs and other Modern-AI tools, it is becoming increasingly hard to argue that these systems “do not understand“ what they are doing.

  AI Verified source (Feb 26, 2026)

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  Sébastien Bubeck

  AI researcher at OpenAI

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  votes For and says:

  It's able to understand any kind of topics that you bring up.

  AI Verified source (Mar 23, 2023)

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  Ilya Sutskever

  AI researcher, co-founder and former former chief scientist at OpenAI

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  votes For and says:

  I'd like to take a small detour and to give an analogy that will hopefully clarify why more accurate prediction of the next word leads to more understanding, real understanding. Let's consider an example. Say you read a detective novel, [...] then le...

  more AI Verified source (Mar 22, 2023)

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  Blaise Agüera y Arcas

  VP and Fellow at Google Research; AI researcher and author

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  votes For and says:

  Fundamentally, concepts are patterns of correlation, association, and generalization. Suitably architected neural nets, whether biological or digital, are able to learn such patterns using any input available. Neural activity is neural activity, whet...

  more AI Verified source (2022)

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  Pierre Beckmann & Matthieu Queloz

  Philosophers; authors of Mechanistic Indicators of Understanding in Large Language Models

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  votes For and says:

  Large language models (LLMs) are often portrayed as merely imitating linguistic patterns without genuine understanding. We argue that recent findings in mechanistic interpretability (MI), the emerging field probing the inner workings of LLMs, render ...

  more Disputed source (Jul 7, 2025)

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  Steven T. Piantadosi

  UC Berkeley psychology professor; computational cognitive scientist

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  votes For and says:

  We argue that LLMs have likely already achieved some key aspects of meaning which, while imperfect, mirror the way meanings work in cognitive theories, as well as approaches to the philosophy of language.

  Disputed source (Aug 5, 2022)

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Against (6)

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  Elan Barenholtz

  FAU psychology professor

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  votes Against and says:

  The model has no exposure to the kinds of information we typically associate with meaning. It knows nothing about the redness of “red” or the spatial extension of “far.” It is blind, deaf, and unembodied. [...] There is no content at the address. No ...

  more AI Verified source (May 19, 2026)

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  Emily M. Bender

  Linguist; AI critic

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  votes Against and says:

  That language models are modeling just the form [...] that's not the same thing as meaning. And they don't have access to the meaning.

  AI Verified source (Apr 28, 2026)

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  Melanie Mitchell

  AI researcher; complexity scientist and author

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  votes Against and says:

  And language models are passive. They’re fed all this text, they predict the next word. [...] It’s only the world of language.

  AI Verified source (Feb 11, 2026)

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  Barry Cooper

  Writer on technology and the humanities

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  votes Against and says:

  It takes the weight of human language, sifts through all the pieces, and constructs an answer in a form it does not comprehend to answer a question it did not understand.

  AI Verified source (Jan 26, 2026)

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  Gary Marcus

  Professor of Psychology and Neural Science

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  votes Against and says:

  create bullshit in the sense that they [...] mimic the general thing...they fake their way through everything

  AI Verified source (Nov 20, 2025)

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  Yann LeCun

  Computer scientist, AI researcher

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  votes Against and says:

  [LLMs] don't really understand the physical world. They don't really have persistent memory. They can't really reason and they certainly can't plan.

  AI Verified source (Mar 7, 2024)

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