How times have changed!

Years ago, I attended a talk by Geoff Hinton about handwritten-digit recognition. A slide also showed glyphs generated from the model: noisy images of digits, as expected. One of them looked like an 'R'. Tongue in cheek, Hinton went "as you can see, the model generalised from digits to letters!". We all laughed.

Fast-forward to 2023: #openai are seriously telling people that #chatGPT and #LLMs have generalised from syntax to semantics. They are taken at face-value. 🤷‍♂️