Language Writ Large: LLMs, ChatGPT, Grounding, Meaning and Understanding

TL;DR

This paper explores the capabilities and limitations of LLMs like ChatGPT, emphasizing the role of inherent biases and the lack of sensorimotor grounding in understanding language.

Contribution

It offers new hypotheses about the emergent biases in LLMs and their connection to language understanding without direct sensorimotor grounding.

Findings

LLMs exhibit convergent biases at scale that enhance language processing.

These biases relate to language's inherent properties and lack of grounding.

The paper proposes hypotheses linking biases to language understanding challenges.

Abstract

Apart from what (little) OpenAI may be concealing from us, we all know (roughly) how ChatGPT works (its huge text database, its statistics, its vector representations, and their huge number of parameters, its next-word training, and so on). But none of us can say (hand on heart) that we are not surprised by what ChatGPT has proved to be able to do with these resources. This has even driven some of us to conclude that ChatGPT actually understands. It is not true that it understands. But it is also not true that we understand how it can do what it can do. I will suggest some hunches about benign biases: convergent constraints that emerge at LLM scale that may be helping ChatGPT do so much better than we would have expected. These biases are inherent in the nature of language itself, at LLM scale, and they are closely linked to what it is that ChatGPT lacks, which is direct sensorimotor grounding to connect its words to their referents and its propositions to their meanings. These convergent biases are related to (1) the parasitism of indirect verbal grounding on direct sensorimotor grounding, (2) the circularity of verbal definition, (3) the mirroring of language production and comprehension, (4) iconicity in propositions at LLM scale, (5) computational counterparts of human categorical perception in category learning by neural nets, and perhaps also (6) a conjecture by Chomsky about the laws of thought. The exposition will be in the form of a dialogue with ChatGPT-4.