The 'Understanding Wars': Scale vs. Meaning in the Age of LLMs

As transformer models surpassed human baselines on NLP benchmarks, a debate erupted over their capabilities, culminating in the "understanding wars" of 2020-22. Bender et al.'s "octopus test" argued that models mimicking language statistically couldn't grasp meaning. GPT-3's arrival intensified the conflict, its power shocking researchers while raising safety and ethical concerns. The debate highlighted disagreements on methodology and direction between academia and industry, leading to an internal 'civil war' within the NLP field.