But you are getting into magical thinking, in that there is no reasonable definition of "understanding" that this system meets. It cannot reason or make deductions. It can't re-write sentences to use completely different words/structures but imply the same meaning. In fact, there is literally no "conceptual" representation here -- there is a vector of numbers that gets passed between encoder and decoder, but it is no more a form of intelligence than the "hidden" state that is maintained by an HMM.
"not having been taught (trained on) any rules (data) about the specific language pairs in question seems to be a strong argument for some kind of semantic representation of language."
Well, yeah, there's a representation of language. But it isn't "semantic" -- it's vector of language-independent parameters for a decoder, which can then output symbols in a second language. Could you theoretically imagine some huge magical network of logistic classifiers that uses this as the first of a (far larger) processing machine that enables something like human intelligence? Maybe. But this is not it. This is bigger, far more complicated/flexible version of a machine that is purpose-built to map between sequences of text.
(That said, I really don't want to go down the rabbit hole of "what is AGI, anyway?", which is about as productive/interesting as hitting the bong and wondering if maybe we all live in a computer simulation after all. I'm merely observing that this is not an intelligent machine.)
> It cannot reason or make deductions. It can't re-write sentences to use completely different words/structures but imply the same meaning.
I agree that it doesn't meet these definitions of understanding. I'm arguing that it meets the definition of "semantics from syntax".
> Well, yeah, there's a representation of language. But it isn't "semantic" -- it's vector of parameters for a decoder, which then output symbols in a second language.
What is it that makes a vector of parameters not semantic? Would it be semantic if they were stored in a different format? If I tell you I have a system in which the concept of being hungry is stored as the number 5, would you say "that's not a concept, that's a number"? If that vector of parameters represents being hungry in any language, what is it if not a semantic representation of hunger?
There's no need to imagine a huge magical network that implements a grandiose vision of intelligence. We're talking about a small, non-magical network that implements a very modest vision of intelligence. Bacteria are still alive even though they're a lot less complex than we are. What would you expect the single-celled equivalent of intelligence to look like? Something with a very minor capacity for inference? Something with rudimentary abstraction across different representations of the same underlying idea?
"not having been taught (trained on) any rules (data) about the specific language pairs in question seems to be a strong argument for some kind of semantic representation of language."
Well, yeah, there's a representation of language. But it isn't "semantic" -- it's vector of language-independent parameters for a decoder, which can then output symbols in a second language. Could you theoretically imagine some huge magical network of logistic classifiers that uses this as the first of a (far larger) processing machine that enables something like human intelligence? Maybe. But this is not it. This is bigger, far more complicated/flexible version of a machine that is purpose-built to map between sequences of text.
(That said, I really don't want to go down the rabbit hole of "what is AGI, anyway?", which is about as productive/interesting as hitting the bong and wondering if maybe we all live in a computer simulation after all. I'm merely observing that this is not an intelligent machine.)