AI godfathers clash on whether LLMs can understand what they say

For every AI doomer, there’s an AI idealist to counteract their view. Over the weekend, the so-called godfathers of artificial intelligence got into a discussion on the social media platform X about whether large language models, which are AI algorithms trained on large sets of data to predict content, have the potential to comprehend what they are saying.

Basically, the central tenet that differentiates a machine from a human being. Consciousness.

It all began when Geoffrey Hinton took a jab at Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, saying that LeCun holds the belief that the risk of…