When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History

* * * I. The Wars of The Roses (2020–22) “understanding wars” • GPT-3 • “a field in crisis” As transformer models approached (and surpassed) “human baselines” on various NLP benchmarks, arguments were already brewing about how to interpret their capabilities. In 2020, those arguments — especially about “meaning” and “understanding” — came to a head in a paper imagining an LLM as an octopus. Emily M. Bender (professor, department of linguistics, University of Washington) Susan Doupé Photography EMILY M. BENDER (professor, department of linguistics, University of Washington; 2024 president, Association for Computational Linguistics): I was having these just unending arguments on Twitter, and grumpy about it. There was one about using BERT to unredact the Mueller report, which is a terrible idea. It seemed like there was just a never-ending supply of people who wanted to come at me and say, “No, no, no, LLMs really do understand.” It was the same argument over and over and over again ... Read full article.