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Chomsky here is dismissive because he mistakenly assumes everyone else shares his goal: "We want to understand language learning, cognition" Other people are h
by jameshart 3y ago
Chomsky here is dismissive because he mistakenly assumes everyone else shares his goal: "We want to understand language learning, cognition"
Other people are happy using these things even if they don't advance our understanding of cognition and language learning.
And if this current thread of development somehow results in something that functionally amounts to AGI, without advancing our knowledge of cognition, while that would be sad for Chomsky, it would nonetheless be revolutionary technology that would transform society.
- azinman2 3y agoHe’s not mistaken, he’s just writing for the advancement of linguistics and cognitive science. If you’re interested in robots that’s different.
- AndyNemmity 3y agoWell said. Maybe I should have made it clearer, but I read the article, so I thought it was obvious in a thread about the article.
- jameshart 3y agoWell, the reason a lot of people were interested in computational linguistics and cognition was probably because they want to make robots, and thought that they might need that. Rodney Brooks certainly is interested in making robots in general. I guess if LLMs mean they might be able to get robots without needing cognitive science and linguistics, that's sad for the people in linguistics and cognitive science who have lost that audience for their work now?
- AndyNemmity 3y agoThe article said LLMs make Chomsky incorrect about how humans learn language. I posted quotes of his indicating that isn't true. Because it isn't true. It's absurdly obvious it isn't true. Everyone replying is talking about other things instead of the topic. LLMs have added zero to the learning about how humans learn language. They've added other value.
- jameshart 3y agoThe article actually doesn't say that LLMs are causing us to rethink human language acquisition. It says that LLMs are causing us to rethink whether Chomsky's universal grammar is a good candidate for a necessary substrate for language acquisition. For example, it says: > Universal grammar enthusiasts have long argued that no other biological species can have language that has grammar and recursive composability, because they don’t have universal grammar. That seems like a reasonable characterization of the universal grammar viewpoint as I understand it, and the existence of models which have acquired impressive language skills without a universal grammar substrate - by using instead a vast quantity of input data - certainly calls that view into legitimate question. It may be that Chomsky believes that he never said the universal grammar was the ONLY way to acquire language, but a lot of computational linguistics research in the Chomsky school certainly took that as an assumption. An assumption that the success of statistical modeling with no universal recursive grammar substrate certainly calls into question.