John Pavlus in Quanta:
Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding within large language models (LLMs) — and she might sound as if she’s poking fun at it. The phrase “hand-wavy” is a favorite, and if she mentions “meaning” or “reasoning,” it’ll often come with conspicuous air quotes. This is just Pavlick’s way of keeping herself honest. As a computer scientist studying language models at Brown University and Google DeepMind, she knows that embracing natural language’s inherent mushiness is the only way to take it seriously. “This is a scientific discipline — and it’s a little squishy,” she said.
More here.