Great -- another "submarines can't swim" person. [EDIT2: Apparently this is not his position, although it's only clear in a different page he links to. See below.]
By this definition nothing is AI. Quite an ignorant stance for someone who used to work at an AI laboratory.
ETA:
> Please join me in spreading the word that people should not trust systems that mindlessly play with words to be correct in what those words mean.
Please join me in spreading the counterargument to this: The best way to predict a physical system is to have an accurate model of a physical system; the best way to predict what a human would write next is to have a model of the human mind.
"They work by predicting the next word" does not prove that they are not thinking.
EDIT2, con't: So, he clarifies his stance elsewhere [1]. His position appears to be:
1. Systems -- including both "classical AI" systems like chess and machine learning / deep learning systems -- can be said to have semantic understanding, even if they are not 100% correct, if there has been some effort to "validate" the output: to correlate it to reality.
2. ChatGPT and other LLMs have had no effort to validate their output
3. Therefore, ChatGPT and other LLMs have no semantic understanding.
#2 is not stated so explicitly. However, he actually goes into quite a bit of detail to emphasize the validation part in #1, going so far as to describe completely inaccurate systems still count as "attempted artificial intelligence" because they "purport to understand". So the only way #3 makes any sense is for #2 to be presented as stated.
And, #2 is simply and clearly false. All the AI labs go to great lengths to increase the correlation between the output of their AI and the truth ("reduce hallucination"); and have been making steady progress.
So to state it forwards:
1. According to [1], a system's output can reflect "real knowledge" and a "semantic understanding" -- and thus qualify as "AI" -- if someone "validate[s] the system by comparing its judgment against [ground truth]".
2. ChatGPT, Claude, and others have had significant effort put into them to validate them against ground truth.
3. So, ChatGPT has semantic understanding, and is thus AI.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Artificia...