Large language models produce fluent, often startling language having never seen a face, felt hunger, or spoken aloud. This course is a serious linguist's tour of how they do it: distributional semantics (you shall know a word by the company it keeps, J.R. Firth), the statistical architecture underneath modern models, and the real argument, still unsettled, over what these systems reveal and fail to reveal about human language.
IACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies