Editing Openai/6910f719-b034-8006-930d-0d5190a7c617 (section)

==== - The CRA is not obsolete. It’s still actively referenced and used as a lens through which philosophers ask whether AI “understands”. ====
* But it does need updating (or reinterpretation) when applied to LLMs and non‑symbolic architectures. Many argue that the thought experiment’s original form (rulebooks, human following instructions) doesn’t map cleanly onto modern systems.
* The key takeaway from recent literature: even if you accept that LLMs are far more complex than Searle’s “room”, you still face the challenge CRA highlights — does the system have semantics, intentionality, understanding — and current evidence suggests the answer remains: we don’t know, and by many accounts: probably not in the human sense.
* So if someone says “CRA is totally irrelevant now” — that’s too strong. But if someone says “CRA exactly as Searle formulated it applies unchanged to GPT‑style models” — that’s also too strong.

If you like, I can pull 5‑10 full recent peer‑review papers (2023‑25) on this topic and summarise how each treats CRA in the LLM era.