Chomsky says: The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and

Chomsky says: The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. Had he said "not ONLY a statistical engine for pattern matching," I would agree. But I'm pretty sure that the majority of what human cognition is and does is exactly what he describes. The pattern matching engine encodes the wisdom of thousands of years of evolution, in addition to the experiences of any particular instance (person), but in the end, most of what we do and say is generated by predicting, based on pattern matching, what is most likely to get the brain positive feedback. The thing that the rush to more and bigger LLMs seems to leave out, to me, is that the pattern matching and prediction that drives intelligent response and behavior in humans (when you can find it), is not merely prediction about language, but rather prediction based on multiple learned (by humanity generally through evolutionary incorporation into our neural architecture, and by individuals through experience) models - of space, time, biology, abstract reasoning, ontologies that objectify the natural and human intellectual worlds, and more. LLMs encode very little if any of that directly, but rather get pieces of it indirectly through the imprint of ontology and reason that are baked into word (token) usage patterns. So, I agree with Chomsky on the main point: you can't really get much beyond fluency with LLMs alone. There is way too much hype on these things.