Step 1: Have humans commit all kinds of knowledge to the Web for 20 years
Step 2: Analyze it.
Step 3: Make a model that regurgitates it and comes up with new variations. Humans are surprised it's so "human-like" in its responses, and anthropomorphosize it to believe it "understands" what it's writing, when it in fact is remixing bits of pieces of that a billion other humans wrote over the years.
And yet ... perhaps that is good enough for a lot of answers! Better than the semantic web.
A lot of human knowledge comes from "accidents" - i.e. the Newton under the tree parable, or from Fleming accidentally discovering Penicillin. It's not inconceivable that some entropy + this massive network could actually come up with novel ideas.
Though it still has no way to perform physical experiments, so it's limited in that way.
Step 2: Analyze it.
Step 3: Make a model that regurgitates it and comes up with new variations. Humans are surprised it's so "human-like" in its responses, and anthropomorphosize it to believe it "understands" what it's writing, when it in fact is remixing bits of pieces of that a billion other humans wrote over the years.
And yet ... perhaps that is good enough for a lot of answers! Better than the semantic web.