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Noam Chomsky, 95, ‘no longer able to talk’ as intellectual’s ‘health deteriorates’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Such an interesting and weird life to have lived. Academically, he lived to see almost his entire body of work thoroughly disrupted by LLMs, specifically the concept of an universal grammar/ and the idea of an 'innate language acquisition device'. I was in a live stream with him about 2 months or so after the first beta models from open AI had started to poke their way into the main-stream. It felt kind of sad, because its like, he was obviously very long in the tooth even then, but when your entire academic career is based on like "one thing", as so many scientists and philosophers careers are, when that 'one thing' ends up being demonstrably false, it seems kind of.. soul crushing? I saw it once before when the revised genomic classification of plants was being released and one of my professors (who i think was like, 1-2 years out from retirement), watched his life time body of work of taxonomic classification get "yeah nah dawged" by the revised genomic taxonomy. I'll say he was not the most engaged instructor and actually insisted on teaching us wrong, which was super aggravating.
I still think Chomskys political work stands apart as a life well lived.
This comment is global-warming-denialism levels of stupid. I’m honestly shocked.
LLM’s have no such implications for the field of linguistics. They’re barely relevant at all.
Do I really need to point out that human beings do not learn language the way LLMs “learn” language? That human beings do not use language the way LLM’s use language? Or that human beings are not mathematical models. Not even approximately. I fucking hate this timeline.
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.
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.