Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans? | Quanta Magazine

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly more impressive at creating human-like text and answering questions, but whether they can understand the meaning of the words they generate is a hotly debated issue. A big challenge is that LLMs are black boxes; they can make predictions and decisions on the order of words, but they cannot communicate the reasons for doing so.

Ellie Pavlick at Brown University is building models that could help understand how LLMs process language…