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Noam Chomsky, 95, ‘no longer able to talk’ as intellectual’s ‘health deteriorates’ (www.independent.co.uk)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm not saying this from a defending LLMs point, I genuinely think they are a waste of so many things in this world and I can't wait for this hype cycle to be over.

However, there is a lot of research and backing behind statistical learning in language acquisition, this is specifically the research subject of my friends. It's a very big thing in intervention for delays in language.

It is opposed to Chomsky's innate language theory, which at this point I think almost any linguist or language/speech sciences researcher would tell you isn't a well accepted theory (at least as a holistic explanation, certainly it could still be true to an extent and a part of other systems).

tl;Dr LLMs are stupid, but it's not broadly true that the way they "learn language" is entirely different from how humans do. The real difference is that they fail to actually learn anything even when imitating humans.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Be that as it may, we aren’t getting any answers from LLM’s. And given that Universal Grammar was the dominant view for so long, the jury is still out on a viable alternative.

Here’s one relevant discussion.

Here’s another.