[Serious] Is ChatGPT a Chinese Room?

[John 6IX Breezy]

Is ChatGPT a Chinese Room? By that I mean is it a digital process that has reduced semantic content to a set of syntactic rules just as in Searle's famous thought problem? If so, does it suggest that semantic content can be fully reduced to syntax?

Been a while since I read the Chinese room paper. There's a similar argument that uses an Octopus analogy that deals more closely with ChatGPT (I think written by Emily Bender).

However ChatGPT, as far as I know, isn't set up to learn the meaning of words in any way approximating us. And its not learning language the way human babies learn it. A child, you could say, first develops the cognitive infrastructure that supports things like meaning and categorization, and then undergoes linguistic development on top of that.

These language models on the other hand, are extracting probabilities from the speech we use in order to make predictions. A word like dog doesn't look like a dog or bark like a dog, and therefore doesn't mean anything to language models. Dog to ChatGPT is nothing more than a pattern of letters (or perhaps 0s and 1s) that precede or follow other pattern of letters in a sentence.