>>It’s related to Jelinek’s Law, named after language-processing AI pioneer Frederick Jelinek: “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech reco

>>It’s related to Jelinek’s Law, named after language-processing AI pioneer Frederick Jelinek: “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.” The joke is that having linguists on your team means you’re still trying to hand-code in deep principles of linguistics, instead of just figuring out how to get as big a blob of intelligence as possible and throw language at it. The limit of Jelinek’s Law is OpenAI, who AFAIK didn’t use insights from linguistics at all, and so made an AI that uses language near-perfectly. It seems a small conjecture to note that the problem here is that "deep principles of linguistics" the linguists are attempting to hard-code, are in fact more like "intermediate principles of linguistics". The linguists haven't approached anywhere near the deeper layers of how the brain works on language (nevermind how the Wernicke's area coordinates w/the visual cortex to generate "I see a bird over there"). So, when they code in their principles, they only screw up the deeper relationships. Of course the LLM has zero actual understanding of any abstract meaning such as "I", "see", "bird", or "over there", but it's still better off without those hardcodings to generate the phrase in a valid or hallucinated context.