Nonsense on Stilts

Blaise Aguera y Arcas, polymath, novelist, and Google VP, has a way with words. When he found himself impressed with Google's recent AI system LaMDA, he didn't just say, "Cool, it creates really neat sentences that in some ways seem contextually relevant", he said, rather lyrically, in an interview with The Economist on Thursday, "I felt the ground shift under my feet … increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent." Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn't actually mean anything at all.