I think this response is more or less fair. Chomsky has been extremely derisive towards anyone with whom he disagrees. You can see that in the NYT piece but it

I think this response is more or less fair. Chomsky has been extremely derisive towards anyone with whom he disagrees. You can see that in the NYT piece but it's been a decades-long pattern where dissenters are automatically morons. That's not a manner befitting a scientist. I agree that "Chomskyism" has been a "false promise" in some sense. It's not clear to me what Chomsky's linguistics have actually accomplished. Perhaps they gave us a new way to think about language. In that sense, they were a philosophical achievement. But we didn't build anything with them, and that's ultimately the test of science. Meanwhile neural nets got us Google translate and ChatGPT (so far). Now, I don't think philosophy is useless, but Chomsky going after machine learning is a bit like "Jesuit astronomers declining to look through Galileo’s telescope" in that Chomsky is a bit like a philosopher immersed in metaphysics who is dismissive towards empirical scientists who accomplished something much more concrete. Then there's the question of whether ChatGPT is conscious and whether it could lead to AGI. I agree with Chomsky that it's not actually intelligent in some sense. But I'm not sure how much that matters. If you can build a Q&A machine, whether it's intelligent or conscious is an interesting philsophical question but ultimately beside the point. Anyway, that debate has been raging for 50 years (see Searle) and isn't especially interesting at this point. As to whether LLMs can scale into AGIs, I have no idea, that depends on how we define AGI. To me, one of the lessons of ChatGPT is that we don't need consciousness to build useful AIs. Chomsky is a humanist. I believe his critique of behaviorialism was based on humanism: he wanted to place humans in a separate category (as philosophers often do). I think his criticism of ChatGPT is ultimately similar. But the worry is misplaced. ChatGPT is in some sense more human than we are. It isn't some foreign, disembodied intelligence. It's based entirely on text we, as a species, generated and in that sense it's a culmination of human potential.