>Those are semantic relationships with the rest of the world.

If this is all that counts as semantic relationships, then I see no reason why a language model doesn't have this kind of semantic relationship, albeit in a very different modality. Tokens and their co-occurrences are a kind of sensor to the world. In the same way we discover quantum mechanics by way of induction over indirect relationships among the signals incident to our perceptual apparatus (the sensors and actuators that translate external signals into internal signals), a language model could learn much about the world by way of induction over token co-occurrences. Sure, there are limits, conscious perception of the world being the big one, but I see no reason to think conscious perception of X is required to know or understand X.

I see what you're saying; ChatGPT doesn't have a physical relationship with the world, doesn't have agency (is essentially paused until given input), doesn't have reward/punishment stimulae, etc.

I do think that a large portion of what seems to be missing here is trivial to add, relative to the effort in creating ChatGPT in the first place.

Side note: I'm not sure 'semantic relationship' is the right term here. Pretty sure it is specific to relationships between linguistic constructs. That wording very much triggered my "Bah, dualism!" response, as I thought you were insinuating some metaphysical bond between the mind and the world. Maybe "meaningful relationship" would serve better?

But we know enough about fundamental physics to know that all physical processes are statistical ones.

What else would it be? Are you suggesting some non-physical process?

Okay. It seems to me that, in analogy to humans having such a relationship with physical reality, machine learning systems have such a relationship with virtual reality — the environment in which they are trained and deployed.