What Does a Large Language Model Know?

This Presidential Special Lecture was recorded Oct. 5, 2024, at Neuroscience 2024 in Chicago.

Recent developments in machine intelligence suggest the prospect of minds that can be artificially constructed. This raises a question: could an agent with such an artificial mind be intelligent, and if so, could it know things? In this lecture, Laurie A. Paul, PhD, raises this question with respect to large language models (LLMs) and suggest that an LLM can be thought of as realizing a certain type of mind, along with a certain type of knowledge. The lecture then explores the way that people can infer the existence of such knowledge and how it is related to the more ordinary sort of knowledge exhibited by human beings. 

Speaker

Laurie A. Paul, PhD

Laurie A. Paul, PhD, is a Millstone Family Professor of philosophy and professor of cognitive science and psychology at Yale University, and leader of the Self and Society Initiative of the Wu Tsai Institute for Human Cognition at Yale University. She specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Her work includes various publications and book chapters, as well as workshops and conference presentations regarding transformative experiences and perception of the self.