[D] A criticism of current models for natural language understanding • r/MachineLearning

Imagine trying to learn Chinese by reading hundreds of books containing only Chinese characters, and absolutely nothing else. Or trying to teach a new language to a 1 year old baby by giving him the text of hundreds of English books written in the past few years. Given hundreds of books written in Chinese, a rare megasavant (with a nearly eidetic memory) will possibly learn to identify certain patterns in the text, and use those patterns to generate coherent Chinese text. This is exactly what neural networks do, they learn to generate meaningful sequence of characters/words. However, neither the savant nor the neural network can be expected to know the meaning of the Chinese text that they generate, they are simply copying partial sequences from their memory.