Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

Post by lanfeust6 » Sun, May 25, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

santoshalper wrote: post #72

mattw1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see this as much more of a hackers vs. corporations ideological split. Which imperfectly maps to leftism vs conservatism. The perception on the left is that once again, corporations are foisting products on us that nobody wants, with no concern for safety, privacy, or respect for creators. For better or worse, the age of garage-tech is mostly dead and Tech has become synonymous with corporatism. This is especially…

Post by sswatson » Sun, May 25, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #76

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…

> But you couldn't explain your brain from principles or its architecture, you'd need all of neuroscience to do it That's not a good argument. Neuroscience was constructed by (other) brains. The brain is trying to explain itself. > The truth is that all of the progress on machine learning is absolutely science. But not much if you're interested in finding out how our brain works, or how language works. One of the int…

Post by rahimnathwani » Sun, May 25, 2025, 7:01 PM UTC

foobarqux wrote: post #87

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…

> LLMs do surface real linguistic structure... It's completely irrelevant because the point he's making is that LLMs operate differently from human languages as evidenced by the fact that they can learn language structures that humans cannot learn. Put another way, I'm sure you can point out an infinitude of similarities between human language faculty and LLMs but it's the critical differences that make LLMs not usef…

Post by oysterville » Sun, May 25, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

Post by gf000 » Sun, May 25, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

lostmsu wrote: post #102

lxgr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] 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".

I think GPT-2 (2019) was already strong enough argument for possibility of modeling knowledge and language that Chomsky rejected.