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Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

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Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#61

Post by mattw1 »

thasso wrote: post #41

> The world’s preeminent linguist Noam Chomsky, and one of the most esteemed public intellectuals of all time, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, tackles these nagging questions in the interview that follows. By whom?

In all seriousness tho, not much of anything he says is taken seriously in an academic sense any more. Univeral Grammar, Minimalism, etc. He's a very petty dude. The reason he doesn't engage with GPT is because it suggests that linguistic learning is unlike a theory he spent his whole life [unsuccessfully] promoting, but he's such a haughty know-it-all, that I guess dummies take that for intelligence? It strikes me as not dissimilar to Trump in a way, where arrogance is conflated with strength, intelligence, etc. Fake it til you make it, or like, forever, I guess.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#62

Post by [deleted] »

retskrad wrote: post #43

It’s time to stop writing in this elitist jargon. If you’re communicating and few people understands you, then you’re a bad communicator. I read the whole thing and thought: wait, was there a new thought or interesting observation here? What did we actually learn?

[deleted]

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#63

Post by lxgr »

titzer wrote: post #46

All this interview proves is that Chomsky has fallen far, far behind how AI systems work today and is retreating to scoff at all the progress machine learning has achieved. Machine learning has given rise to AI now. It can't explain itself from principles or its architecture. But you couldn't explain your brain from principles or its architecture, you'd need all of neuroscience to do it. Because the brain is digital…

> [...] I can't help but feel it's an a really old take [...]

To be fair the article is from two years ago, which when talking about LLMs in this age arguably does count as "old", maybe even "really old".

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#64

Post by thomasahle »

thasso wrote: post #41

> The world’s preeminent linguist Noam Chomsky, and one of the most esteemed public intellectuals of all time, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, tackles these nagging questions in the interview that follows. By whom?

Google Scholar

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#65

Post by TiredOfLife »

thasso wrote: post #41

> The world’s preeminent linguist Noam Chomsky, and one of the most esteemed public intellectuals of all time, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, tackles these nagging questions in the interview that follows. By whom?

[flagged]

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#66

Post by mattw1 »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #52

I'm noticing that leftists overwhelmingly toe the same line on AI skepticism, which suggests to me an ideological motivation.

I have experienced this too. It's definitely part of the religion but I'm not sure why tbh. Maybe they equate it with like tech is bad mkay, which, looking at who leads a lot of the tech companies, is somewhat understandable, altho very myopic.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#67

Post by skydhash »

randmeerkat wrote: post #44
skydhash wrote: post #13

Quite a nice overview. For almost any specific measure, you can find something that is better than human at that point. And now LLMs architecture have made possible for computers to produce complete and internally consistent paragraphs of text, by rehashing all the digital data that can be found on the internet. But what we're good as using all of our capabilities to transform the world around us according to an inte…

> It can help us, just like a calculator can help us solve an equation. A calculator is consistent and doesn’t “hallucinate” answers to equations. An LLM puts an untrustworthy filter between the truth and the person. Google was revolutionary because it increased access to information. LLMs only obscure that access, while pretending to be something more.

I'm not a native english speaker, so I've used for an essay where they told us to target a certain word count. I was close, but the verbiage to get to that word count doesn't come naturally to me. So I used Germini and tell it to rewrite the text targeting that word count (my only prompt). Then I reviewed the answer, rewriting where it strayed from the points I was making.

Also I used it for a few programming tasks I was pretty sure was in the datasets (how to draw charts with python and manipulate pandas frame). I know the domain, but wasn't in the mood to analyse the docs to get the implementation information. But the information I was seeking was just a few lines of sample code. In my experience, anything longer is pretty inconsistent and worthless explanations.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#68

Post by hatsunearu »

thasso wrote: post #41

> The world’s preeminent linguist Noam Chomsky, and one of the most esteemed public intellectuals of all time, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, tackles these nagging questions in the interview that follows. By whom?

That is unbelievable that someone could glaze someone this hard

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#69

Post by mattw1 »

paulsutter wrote: post #42

"Expert in (now-)ancient arts draws strange conclusion using questionable logic" is the most generous description I can muster. Quoting Chomsky: > These considerations bring up a minor problem with the current LLM enthusiasm: its total absurdity, as in the hypothetical cases where we recognize it at once. But there are much more serious problems than absurdity. > One is that the LLM systems are designed in such a way…

[flagged]

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#70

Post by santoshalper »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #52

I'm noticing that leftists overwhelmingly toe the same line on AI skepticism, which suggests to me an ideological motivation.

Or an ideological alignment of values. Generative AI is strongly associated with large corporations that are untrusted (to put it generously) by those on the left.

An equivalent observation might be that the only people who seem really, really excited about current AI products are grifters who want to make money selling it. Which looks a lot like Blockchain to many.

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