Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

chomsky.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 389 posts

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

#251

Post by ggm »

sdwr wrote: post #219
papaver-somnamb wrote: post #212

There was an interesting debate where Chomsky took a position on intelligence being rooted in symbolic reasoning and Asimov asserted a statistical foundation (ah, that was not intentional ;). LLM designs to date are purely statistical models. A pile, a morass of floating point numbers and their weighted relationships, along with the software and hardware that animates them and the user input and output that makes the…

That's not true, symbols emerge out of the statistics. Just look at the imagenet analysis that identified distinct concepts in different layers, or the experiments with ablation in LLMs. They may not be doing strict formal logic, but they are definitely compressing information into, and operating using, symbols.

Which argues much symbolic manipulation is formulaic, and not inductive reasoning or indicative of intelligence.

Sentence parsing with multiple potential verb-noun-adjective interpretations are an example of old, Chomsky made fruit flies like a banana famous for a reason.

(without the weights and that specific sentence programmed in, I would be interested exactly how the symbol models cope with that, and the myriad other examples)

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

#252

Post by ggm »

irrational wrote: post #204

I have a degree in linguistics. We were taught Chomsky’s theories of linguistics, but also taught that they were not true. (I don’t want to say what university it was since this was 25 years ago and for all I know that linguistics department no longer teaches against Chomsky). The end result is I don’t take anything Chomsky says seriously. So, it is difficult for me to engage with Chomsky’s ideas.

This reminds me of the debates over F.R. Leavis, and the impact it had on modern english teaching worldwide. There are a small dying cohort of english professors who are refugees from internecine warfare.

Same thing happened in Astronomy. Students of Fred Hoyle can't work in some institutions. &c &c.

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

#253

Post by sireat »

belter wrote: post #154
calibas wrote: post #99

The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists. Taking a word (token) and abstracting it's "meaning" as a 1,000-dimension vector seems like something that should revolutionize the field of linguistics. A whole new tool for analyzing and understanding the underlying patterns of all language! And there's a fact here that's very hard to disp…

> whether or not an LLM is conscious in the same way as a human being The problem is... that there is a whole amount of "smart" activities humans do without being conscious of it. - Walking, riding a bike, or typing on a keyboard happen fluidly without conscious planning of each muscle movement. - You can finish someone sentence or detect if a sentence is grammatically wrong, often without being able to explain the r…

Indeed, the "rider and elephant" issue.

During Covid I gave a lecture on Python on Zoom in a non-English language. It was a beginner's topic about dictionary methods. I was attempting to multi-task and had other unrelated tasks open on second computer.

Midway through the lecture I noticed to my horror that I had switched to English without the audience noticing.

Going back through the recording I noticed the switch was fluid and my delivery was reasonable. What I talked about was just as good as something presented by LLM these days.

So this brings up the question - why aren't we p-zombies all the time instead of 99% of time?

Are there any tasks that absolutely demand human consciousness as we know it?

Presumably long term planning is something that active human consciousness is needed.

Perhaps there is some need for consciousness when one is in "conscious mastery" phase of acquiring a skill.

This goes for any skill such as riding a bicycle/playing chess/programming at a high level.

Once one reaches "unconscious mastery" stage the rider can concentrate on higher meta game.

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

#254

Post by johnb231 »

xwolfi wrote: post #215
AIorNot wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM models are to a large extent neuronal analogs of human neural architecture - of course they reason The claim of the “stochastic parrot” needs to go away Eg see: https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude I think the rub is that people think you need consciousness to do reasoning, I’m NOT claiming LLMs have consciousness or awareness

They are really not neuronal analogs, reasoning is far from what they do. If they reasoned, they'd stick to their guns more readily, but try to contradict an LLM and it will make any logic leap you ask it too. If you debate with me, I'll keep reasoning on the same premises and usually the difference between two humans is not in reasoning but in choice of premises. For instance you really want here to assert that LLM…

> An LLM cannot do that, it cannot attack your point very well, it doesn't know how to say you're wrong, because it doesn't care anyway. It just completes your sentences, so if you say "now you're wrong, change your mind" it will, which sounds far from reasoning to me, and quite unreasonable in fact.

That is absolute bullshit. Go try any frontier reasoning model such as Gemini 2.5 Pro or GPT-o3 and see how that goes. They will inform you that you are full of shit.

Do you understand that they are deep learning models with hundreds of layers and trillions of parameters? They have learned patterns of reasoning, and can emulate human reasoning well enough to call you out on that nonsense.

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

#257

Post by zombot »

The voice of reason. And, as always, the voice of reason is being vigorously ignored. Dreams of big profits and exerting control through generated lies are irresistible. And among others, HN comment threads demonstrate how even people who should know better are falling for it in droves. In fact this very thread shows how Chomsky's arguments fall on deaf ears.

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

#258

Post by OccamsMirror »

user_7832 wrote: post #236
loveparade wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution I would push back on this a little bit. While it has not helped us to understand our own intelligence, it has made me question whether such a thing even exists. Perhaps there are no simple and beautiful natural laws, like those that exists in Physics, that can explain how humans think and…

> The big lesson from the AI development in the last 10 years from me has been "I guess humans really aren't so special after all" Instead I would take the opposite take. How wonderful is it, that with naturally evolved processes and neural structures, have we been able to create what we have. Van Gogh’s paintings came out of the human brain. The Queens of the Skies - hundreds of tons of metal and composites - flying…

"I guess humans really aren't so special after all"

This is a crazy take to me. As compared to what? The machines that we built?

Until we discover comparably intelligent life in the universe I think it's fair to say that we are indeed very special.

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

#259

Post by ZeroTalent »

blast wrote: post #223
whattheheckheck wrote: post #4

3.35 hrs Chomsky interview on ML Street Talk https://youtu.be/axuGfh4UR9Q

Chomsky's in the last hour of that. That part is unusually good btw. It's actually elegaic.

It's shocking how people are putting him down for the OP interview with just a couple of questions in 2023. The dude was 94 years old. I also did not predict where we would be in 2025 with LLMs. And neither did you. (When I say you, I mean some of the other commenters.)

Are we seriously saying that his ideas are not taken seriously? his theory of grammar/language construction was a major contributor to modern programming languages, for one.

Post reply on HN