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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)

#311

Post by belter »

sireat wrote: post #253
belter wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

Phantoms in the Brain [1] has fantastic examples of the type of scenarios you described.

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31555.Phantoms_in_the_Br...

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

#312

Post by suddenlybananas »

visarga wrote: post #286

Brains don't have innate grammar more than languages are selected to fit baby brains. Chomsky got it backwards, languages co-evolved with human brains to fit our capacities and needs. If a language is not useful or can't be learned by children, it does not expand, it just disappears. It's like wondering how well your shoes fit your feet, forgetting that shoes are made and chosen to fit your feet in the first place.

It's not an either/or. The fact any human language is learnable by any human and not by, say, chimpanzees needs explaining.

Chomsky also talks about these kind of things in detail in Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) where they describe them as "third factors" in language acquisition.

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

#313

Post by jamincan »

namaria wrote: post #285
dahcryn wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the interesting idea is the followup question: Can you do complex reasoning without intelligence? LLM's seem to have proven themselves to be more than a one-trick-pony. There is actually some resemblance of reasoning and structuring etc.. No matter if directly within the LLM, or supported by computer code. E.g it can be argued that the latest LLMs like Gemini 2.5 and Claude 4 in fact do complex reasoning. We ha…

> E.g it can be argued that the latest LLMs like Gemini 2.5 and Claude 4 in fact do complex reasoning. They most definitely don't. We attach symbolic meaning to their output because we can map it semantically to the input we gave it. Which is why people are often caught by surprise when these mappings break down. LLMs can emulate reasoning, but the failure modes show that they don't. We can get them to be coincidenta…

Humans aren't infallible and make mistakes in reasoning as well. What is fundamentally different about the mistakes we make versus the mistakes that Claude or Gemini make? Haven't LLM's even been shown to make the same posthoc rationalizations of mistakes that we as humans do all the time?

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

#314

Post by suddenlybananas »

Xss3 wrote: post #167
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can LLMs actually parse human languages? Or can they react to stimuli with a trained behavioral response? Dogs can learn to sit when you say "sit", and learn to roll over when you say "roll over". But the dog doesn't parse human language; it reacts to stimuli with a trained behavioral response. (I'm not that familiar with LLM/ML, but it seems like trained behavioral response rather than intelligent parsing. I believe…

Dogs out of all creatures probably actually do have some parsing going on for human language. They learn it like we do, picking up context from the environment, actions, tone, facial expressions, body language, etc. You can say 'what's that' in many different ways and a clever dog will react differently for each, even if it's the first time it's heard you say 'what's that?' In a scared tone it'll still react differen…

Parsing? I don't think dogs "parse" language in a decompositional matter.

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

#315

Post by arp242 »

foldr wrote: post #290
jdkee wrote: post #238

Chomsky's own words. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

Most likely not. This is one of his weird pieces co-authored with Jeffrey Watamull. I don’t doubt that he put his name on it voluntarily, but it reads much more like Watamull than Chomsky. The views expressed in the interview we’re commenting on are much more Chomsky-like.

He explicitly says he didn't write it in this article:

"NC: Credit for the article should be given to the actual author, Jeffrey Watumull, a fine mathematician-linguist-philosopher. The two listed co-authors were consultants, who agree with the article but did not write it."

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

#316

Post by suddenlybananas »

permo-w wrote: post #266
gerdesj wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists." No, there is no understanding at all. Please don't confuse codifying with understanding or translation. LLMs don't understand their input, they simply act on it based on the way they are trained on it. "And there's a fact here that's very hard to dispute, this method works. I can give a co…

I think the overarching theme that I glean from LLM critics is some kind of visceral emotional reaction, disgust even, with the idea of them, leading to all these proxy arguments and side quests in order to try and denigrate the idea of them without actually honestly engaging with what they are or why people are interacting with them. so what they don't "understand", by your very specific definition of the word "unde…

You're thinking like an engineer and not a scientist. It's fine, but don't confuse the two.

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

#317

Post by suddenlybananas »

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…

>For almost any specific measure, you can find something that is better than human at that point.

Learning language from small data.

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

#318

Post by suddenlybananas »

SirHumphrey wrote: post #293
guappa wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's safe to say that anyone who voted for Trump disagrees to his contributions.

In Europe he is quite a controversial figure even on the left part of political spectrum- mainly because of his takes on Srebrenica genocide (and recently on the Ukraine war).

You're confusing the centre and the left in Europe.

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

#319

Post by suddenlybananas »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #304
js8 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the two things are related. Whether acquisition of human language is nature or nurture - it is still learning of some sort. Yes, maybe we can reproduce that learning process in LLMs, but that doesn't mean the LLMs imitate only the nurture part (might as well be just finetuning), and not the nature part. An airplane is not an explanation for a bird's flight.

The great breakthrough in AI turned out to be LLMs. Nature , for an LLM, is its design: graph, starting weights, etc. Environment , for an LLM, is what happens during training. LLMs are capable of learning grammar entirely from their environment, which suggests that infants are too, which is bad for Chomsky's position that the basics of grammar are baked into human DNA.

LLMs require vastly more data than humans and still struggle with some more esoteric grammatical rules like parasitic gaps. The fact grammar can be approximated given trillions of words doesn't explain how babies learn language from a much more modest dataset.

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

#320

Post by suddenlybananas »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #147
foobarqux wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I read it and found nothing similar to “Stop wasting your time; naval vessels do it all the time.” You implied in the previous paragraph that you didn't in fact read it and you only "skimmed" it. Maybe that's why you "found nothing similar to 'stop wasting your time; naval vessels do it all the time". But even in skimming the paper it's incomprehensible how you could miss it: At least the first 23 pages of the draf…

There is a difference between supporting one research paradigm over another and rejecting science altogether to focus on engineering. The first quote and the context around it implies the latter. The success of naval vessels shows it’s possible to navigate without innate star and wind comprehension, so maybe we should think of that inner stuff as phlogiston. (Yeah, this analogy isn’t as nice but it’s quite hard to tr…

Do you not genuinely not understand the logic of the argument? The fact that A does Y using Z doesn't entail that B does Y using Z.
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