They already do read.
To me, ChatGPT clearly displays degrees of understanding. Often when I ask it to do things like make a certain modification to a piece of code, I'll ask it "why did you choose to do it like that?" and it gives a coherent explanation. That it correctly did what I asked and that it's explanation of why it did that way comport with one another implies understanding in my view. How could it not? What else would that imply? And if I ask a human to do the same thing and get the same result you'd have no problem with saying "well it's able to do that because it understands, and if it didn't understand then it would have zero capability of doing that". So, what's with the double standard?
For me, it's matrix multiplications on data made to output things that are approximations to what a human has written before on that question or text you're prompting it.
I know how training a deep neural network works and there's no reading involved for me :)
It's just estimating what a person would write (being trained on a really large data set of what people wrote). If it's trained on gibberish, it will just output gibberish. If I ask you to read a book with gibberish words would you do it? ChatGPT would (according to you) "read it" and recite the gibberish I gave it without a problem.
The matrix multiplications used to build these models don't show any comprehension, agency, or consciousness. Their point is to estimate the next data point given the previous data point, they will perform the same task independent from which training data we give them. That's not reading.
I don't say this might not change in the future, yet treating ChatGPT like a human using words like "reading," "understanding" etc. or intelligence for that matter is just anthropomorphizing for me.
Reading and understanding are obviously different things. I can read a paper on quantum physics, but I can't understand it.
