Abstract

The development of machines that “talk like usµ, also known as Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems, is the Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence (AI), since language is the quintessence of human intelligence. Never has the trust that we can build “talking machinesµ been stronger than the one engendered by the last generation of NLU systems, like ChatGPT. The achievements of AI systems have sparkled, or better renewed, an intense scientific debate on their true language understanding capabilities. This paper aims at contributing to such debate by carrying out a critical analysis of the linguistic abilities of the most recent NLU systems. I contend that they incorporate important aspects of the way language is learnt and processed by humans, but at the same time they lack key interpretive and inferential skills that it is unlikely they can attain unless they are integrated with structured knowledge and the ability to exploit it for language use.