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Comment by mardef | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call someone reciting a French-English dictionary a French speaker that understands the language.

Other way around. If a kid understood the concepts of multiplation, they could train themselves on the next logical steps like exponents.

The consequences of this in the terms of AI would mean they build on a series of concepts and would quickly dwarf us in intelligence.

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Neither would I. But if someone who can translate a French sentence into English preserving the meaning most of the time, I think it would be reasonable to say that this person understands French. And that is what we're talking about here - models do produce correct output much of the time, even when you give them input that was not present in their training data. The "stochastic parrot" argument is precisely the claim that this still does not prove understanding. The "Chinese room" argument takes it one notch further and claims that even if the translation is 100% correct 100% of the time, that still doesn't prove understanding.

How many people years existed between the time people discovered multiplication and then exponentiation? Did it happen in wall clock time in a single generation?

> How many people years existed between the time people discovered multiplication and then exponentiation?

We don't know, because these concepts were discovered before writing. We do know that far larger jumps have been made by individual mathematicians who never made it past 33 years of age.

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