Yoav Shoham: Understanding Understanding

Can machines really understand? Lovelace and Searle thought not. Turing thought yes. (OK, that’s not totally accurate, but let’s not ruin a good story.) With the advent of large language models, the question has resurfaced in force, again with some strong skeptics such as Bender et al. In this seminar, Yoav Shoham shares his views, based mostly on work at AI21 Labs. Spoilers: (1) He’s with Turing. (2) LLMs, as currently built, are necessary but not sufficient. (3) The question is more interesting than the answer. This HAI seminar took place on May 10, 2023. Upcoming HAI events can be found here: