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1. We always knew the Turing test was insufficient. 2. The Chinese Room argument can invite itself back out, as always. It was never more than an intuition pum

1. We always knew the Turing test was insufficient. 2. The Chinese Room argument can invite itself back out, as always. It was never more than an intuition pump and not a very good one. 3. Universal Grammar doesn't really figure into it one way or the other. LLMs don't work the way we do, despite being "neural". They get their basic grammar from a very different place. Chomsky's arguments are doing fine, though this is a great time to look at them through new lenses.

dosinga 3y ago
ad 3) If the claim of Chomsky (followers) is that you can only learn human language if you have the universal grammar, then the discovery of a system that learns human languages without such a grammar does seem like rather relevant to the discussion
- furyofantares 3y ago
  That isn't the claim.
  - markisus 3y ago
    But many people did believe that. From the article, > I personally remember very heated arguments on the MIT campus between Chomsky followers and computer scientists working on statistical models in the early 2000’s. The arguments came up in computer science faculty hiring meetings. The Chomskians claimed that because of the need for universal grammar there would never be anything useful that came out of statistical approaches to language. ChatGPT has proved them wrong. (And yes, I personally shouted angrily at Chomskians in some of those hiring meetings.)
    - foobarqux 3y ago
      Chomsky himself never said that, he said that it wouldn't produce anything useful for understanding how language works in humans.
- foobarqux 3y ago
  It's completely irrelevant, as he points out LLMs can learn any "language" even ones that humans can't, so therefore it doesn't tell you anything about humans. A related argument is that you can predict the weather using a neural net but that doesn't mean that the weather works like a neural network and it doesn't tell you anything about how weather does work.

dosinga 3y ago

ad 3) If the claim of Chomsky (followers) is that you can only learn human language if you have the universal grammar, then the discovery of a system that learns human languages without such a grammar does seem like rather relevant to the discussion

furyofantares 3y ago
That isn't the claim.
- markisus 3y ago
  But many people did believe that. From the article, > I personally remember very heated arguments on the MIT campus between Chomsky followers and computer scientists working on statistical models in the early 2000’s. The arguments came up in computer science faculty hiring meetings. The Chomskians claimed that because of the need for universal grammar there would never be anything useful that came out of statistical approaches to language. ChatGPT has proved them wrong. (And yes, I personally shouted angrily at Chomskians in some of those hiring meetings.)
  - foobarqux 3y ago
    Chomsky himself never said that, he said that it wouldn't produce anything useful for understanding how language works in humans.
foobarqux 3y ago
It's completely irrelevant, as he points out LLMs can learn any "language" even ones that humans can't, so therefore it doesn't tell you anything about humans. A related argument is that you can predict the weather using a neural net but that doesn't mean that the weather works like a neural network and it doesn't tell you anything about how weather does work.