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Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)
- wetpaws 1y ago[dead]
- schoen 1y ago(2023)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BryanLegend 1y agoYean, a lot has happened in two years
- asveikau 1y agoFrom what I've heard, Chomsky had a stroke which impacted his language. You will, unfortunately, not hear a recent opinion from him on current developments.
- throwaway314155 1y agoGeez, talk about irony. That's terrible.
- asveikau 1y agoHe's currently 96, and I started noticing in his 2022-2023 interviews that he seemed to lose a bit of the spark, so while it is always sad and moving to see such things, I don't know how much Chomsky left we were getting anyway. Tempus fugit.
- msh 1y agoHe should just surrender and give chatgpt whatever land it wants.
- bigyabai 1y agoManufactured intelligence to modulate a world of manufactured consent! I agree with the rest of these comments though, listening to Chomsky wax about the topic-du-jour is a bit like trying to take lecture notes from the Swedish Chef.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- scrubs 1y ago>"bit like trying to take lecture notes from the Swedish Chef." I'll be liberally borrowing, and using that simile! It's hilarious. Bork, bork, bork! The best thing is you can be right, and the other side can't take offense. It's the Muppets after all. It's brilliant!
- klipt 1y agoDude is 96, so he definitely has a different perspective than most, for better or worse.
- whattheheckheck 1y ago3.35 hrs Chomsky interview on ML Street Talk https://youtu.be/axuGfh4UR9Q https://youtu.be/axuGfh4UR9Q
- blast 1y agoChomsky's in the last hour of that. That part is unusually good btw. It's actually elegaic.
- ZeroTalent 1y agoIt'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.
- inquirerGeneral 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- next_xibalba 1y agoChomsky is always saying that LLMs and such can only imitate, not understand language. But I wonder if there is a degree of sophistication at which he would concede these machines exceed "imitation". If his point is that LLMs arrive at language in a way different than humans... great. But I'm not sure how he can argue that some kind of extremely sophisticated understanding of natural language is not embedded in these models in a way that, at this point, exceeds the average human. In all fairness, this was written in 2023, but given his longstanding stubbornness on this topic, I doubt it would make a difference.
- icedrift 1y agoFrom what I've read/watched of Chomsky he's holding out for something that truly cannot be distinguished from human no matter how hard you tried.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoIsn’t that just a Turing test? I’m perfectly willing to bet that there are LLMs that can pass a Turing test, even against a mind like Chomsky.
- guappa 1y agoJust ask for an opinion on who's right between israel and palestine and an AI will refuse to reply :D
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- f30e3dfed1c9 1y agoI think that misses the point entirely. Even if you constructed some system the output of which could not be distinguished from human-produced language but that either (1) clearly operated according to principles other than those that govern human language or (2) operated according to principles that its creators could not adequately explain, it would not be of that much interest to him. He wants to understand how human language works. If I get him right — and I'm absolutely sure that I don't in important ways — then LLMs are not that interesting because both (1) and (2) above are true of them.
- mrandish 1y ago[Edit to remove: It was not clear that this was someone else's intro re-posted on Chomsky's site]
- skydhash 1y agoQuite 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 internal model that is partially shared between individuals. And we have complete control over that internal model, diverging from reality and converging towards it on whims. So we can't produce and manipulate text faster, but rarely the end game is to produce and manipulate text. Mostly it's about sharing ideas and facts (aka internal models) and the control is ultimately what matters. It can help us, just like a calculator can help us solve an equation. EDIT After learning to draw, I have that internal model that I switch to whenever I want to sketch something. It's like a special mode of observation, where you no longer simply see, but pickup a lot of extra details according to all the drawing rules you internalized. There's not a lot, they're just intrinsically connected with each other. The difficult part is hand-eye coordination and analyzing the divergences between what you see and the internal model. I think that's why a lot of artists are disgusted with AI generators. There's no internal models. Trying to extract one from a generated picture is a futile exercice. Same with generated texts. Alterations from the common understanding follows no patterns.
- randmeerkat 1y ago> 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.
- skydhash 1y agoI'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.
- petermcneeley 1y agoI recently saw a new LLM that was fooled by "20 pounds of bricks vs 20 feathers". These are not reasoning machines.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoI recently had a computer tell me that 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3. It must not be a math capable machine. Perhaps it is more important to know the limitations of tools rather than dismiss their utility entirely due to the existence of limitations.
- blamestross 1y agoA computer isn't a math capable machine. > Perhaps it is more important to know the limitations of tools rather than dismiss their utility entirely due to the existence of limitations. Well, yes. And "reasoning" is only something LLMs do coincidentally, to their function as sequence continuation engines. Like performing accurate math on rationale numbers, it can happen if you put in a lot of work and accept a LOT of expensive computation. Even then there exists computations that just are not reasonable or feasible. Reminding folks to dismiss the massive propaganda engine pushing this bubble isn't "dismissing their utility entirely". These are not reasoning machines. Treating them like they are will get you hurt eventually.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoMy point is that computers, when used properly, can absolutely do math. And LLMs, when used properly, can absolutely explain the reasoning behind why a pound of bricks and a pound of feathers weigh the same. Can they reason? Maybe, depending on your definition of reasoning. An example: which weighs more a pound of bricks and 453.59 grams of feathers? Explain your reasoning. LLM: The pound of bricks weighs slightly more. *Reasoning:* * *1 pound* is officially defined as *0.45359237 kilograms*, which is *453.59237 grams*. * You have *453.59 grams* of feathers. So, the pound of bricks (453.59237 grams) weighs a tiny fraction more than the 453.59 grams of feathers. For most practical purposes, they'd be considered the same, but technically, the bricks are heavier by 0.00237 grams. /llm It is both correct and the reasoning is sound. Do I understand that the machine is a pattern following machine, yes! Is there an argument to be made that humans are also that? Probably. Chomsky himself argued in favor of a universal grammar, after all. I’m steel manning this a bit, but the point is that LLMs are capable of doing some things which are indistinguishable from human reasoning in terms of results. Does the process matter in all cases?
- glimshe 1y ago[flagged]
- jsheard 1y ago> Please summarize the linked text Please don't post HN comments that are just giant walls of LLM copypasta.
- xigency 1y agoSchrodinger's HN: LLM's are really great. No don't make me read it!
- glimshe 1y agoI shortened it. I think this is one instance where it's actually relevant. The "opinion" of an LLM about a LLM criticism from one the leading linguists in history. It got flagged, but I feel the flagging was knee-jerk and failed to understand the irony in the context.
- 110mAh 1y ago[flagged]
- johnfn 1y ago> It’s as if a biologist were to say: “I have a great new theory of organisms. It lists many that exist and many that can’t possibly exist, and I can tell you nothing about the distinction.” > Again, we’d laugh. Or should. Should we? This reminds me acutely of imaginary numbers. They are a great theory of numbers that can list many numbers that do 'exist' and many that can't possibly 'exist'. And we did laugh when imaginary numbers were first introduced - the name itself was intended as a derogatory term for the concept. But who's laughing now?
- bubblyworld 1y agoIn the case of complex numbers mathematicians understand the distinction extremely well, so I'm not sure it's a perfect analogy.
- kelsey978126 1y agoThis is the point where i realized he has no clue what he is saying. Theres so many creatures that once existed that can never again exist on earth due to the changes that the planet has gone through over millions, billions of years. The oxygen rich atmosphere that supported the dinosaurs for instance. If we had some kind of system that can put together proper working DNA for all the creatures that ever actually existed on this planet, some half of them would be completely nonviable if introduced to the ecosystem today. He is failing to see that there is an incredible understanding of systems that we are producing with this work, but he is a very old man from a very different time and contrarianism is often the only way to look smart or reasoned when you have no clue whats actually going on, so I am not shocked by his take.
- chongli 1y agoImaginary numbers are not relevant at all. There’s nothing whatsoever to do with the everyday use of the word imaginary. They could just as easily have been called “vertical numbers” and real numbers called “horizontal numbers” in order to more clearly illustrate their geometric interpretation in the complex plane. The term “imaginary number” was coined by Rene Descartes as a derogatory and the ill intent behind his term has stuck ever since. I suspect his purpose was theological rather than mathematical and we are all the worse for it.
- netcan 1y agoInsect behaviour. Flight of birds. Turtle navigation. A footballer crossing the field to intercept a football. This is what Chomsky always wanted ai to be... especially language ai. Clever solutions to complex problems. Simple once you know how they work. Elegant. I sympathize. I'm a curious human. We like elegant, simple revelations that reveal how out complex world is really simple once you know it's secrets. This aesthetic has also been productive. And yet... maybe some things are complicated. Maybe LLMs do teach us something about language... that language is complicated. So sure. You can certainly critique "ai blogosphere" for exuberance and big speculative claims. That part is true. Otoh... linguistics is one of the areas that ai based research may turn up some new insights. Overall... what wins is what is most productive.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- klabb3 1y ago> Maybe LLMs do teach us something about language... that language is complicated. It certainly teaches us many things. But an LLM trained on as many words (or generally speaking an AI trained on sounds) in similar quantities of a toddler learning to understand, parse and apply language, would not perform well with current architectures. They need orders of magnitude more training material to get even close. Basically, current AI learns slowly, but of course it’s much faster in wall clock time because it’s all computer. What I mean is: what makes an ALU (CPU) better than a human at arithmetic? It’s just faster and makes fewer errors. Similarly, what makes Google or Wikipedia better than an educated person? It’s just storing and helping you access stored information, it’s not magic (anymore). You can manually do everything mechanically, if you’re willing to waste the time to prove a point. An LLM does many things better than humans, but we forget they’ve been trained on all written history and have hundreds of billions of parameters. If you compare what an LLM can do with the same amount of training to a human, the human is much better even at picking up patterns – current AIs strongest skill. The magic comes from the unseen vast amounts of training data. This is obvious when using them – stray just slightly outside of the training zone to unfamiliar domains and ”ability” drops rapidly. The hard part is figuring out these fuzzy boundaries. How far does interpolating training data get you? What are the highest level patterns are encoded in the training data? And most importantly, to what extent do those patterns apply to novel domains? Alternatively, you can use LLMs as a proxy for understanding the relationship between domains, instead of letting humans label them and decide the taxonomy. One such example is the relationship between detecting patterns and generating text and images – it turns out to be more or less reversible through the same architecture. More such remarkable similarities and anti-similarities are certainly on the horizon. For instance, my gut feeling says that small talk is closer to driving a car but very different from puzzle solving. We don’t really have a (good) taxonomy over human- or animal brain processes.
- alabhyajindal 1y ago[flagged]
- submeta 1y agoChomsky’s notion is: LLMs can only imitate, not understand language. But what exactly is understanding? What if our „understanding“ is just unlocking another level in a model? Unlocking a new form of generation?
- smokel 1y agoUnderstanding is probably not much more than making abstractions into simpler terms until you are left with something one can relate to by intuition or social consensus.
- npteljes 1y agoI have trouble with the notion "understanding". I get the usefulness of the word, but I don't think that we are capable to actually understand. I also think that we are not even able to test for understanding - a good imitation is as good as understanding. Also, understanding has limits. In school, they often say on class that you should forget whatever you have been taught so far, because this new layer of knowledge that they are about to teach you. Was the previous knowledge not "understanding" then? Is the new one "understanding"? If we define "understanding" like "useful", as in, not an innate attribute, but something in relation to a goal, then again, a good imitation, or a rudimentary model can get very far. ChatGPT "understood" a lot of things I have thrown at it, be that algorithms, nutrition, basic calculations, transformation between text formats, where I'm stuck in my personal development journey, or how to politely address people in the email I'm about to write. >What if our „understanding“ is just unlocking another level in a model? I believe that it is - that understanding is basically an illusion. Impressions are made up from perceptions and thinking, and extrapolated over the unknown. And just look how far that got us!
- thasso 1y ago> 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?
- mattw1 1y ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 1y agoPeople who particularly agreed with Chomsky's inherently politicized beliefs, presumably.
- mattw1 1y agoIn 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.
- apelapan 1y agoThe comparison to Trump seems very unfair. I'm not in the academy and didn't know the current standing of his work, but he was certainly a big name that popped up everywhere (as a theorists in the field, not as a general celebrity) when I took an introduction to linguistics 20+ years ago. As this is Hacker News, it is worth mentioning that he developed the concept of context-free grammars. That is something many of us encounter on a regular basis. No matter what personality flaws he might have and how misguided some of his political ideas might be, he is one of the big thinkers of the 20th century. Very much unlike Trump.
- thomasahle 1y ago
- paulsutter 1y ago"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 that they cannot tell us anything about language, learning, or other aspects of cognition, a matter of principle, irremediable... The reason is elementary: The systems work just as well with impossible languages that infants cannot acquire as with those they acquire quickly and virtually reflexively. Response from o3: LLMs do surface real linguistic structure: • Hidden syntax: Attention heads in GPT-style models line up with dependency trees and phrase boundaries—even though no parser labels were ever provided. Researchers have used these heads to recover grammars for dozens of languages. • Typology signals: In multilingual models, languages that share word-order or morphology cluster together in embedding space, letting linguists spot family relationships and outliers automatically. • Limits shown by contrast tests: When you feed them “impossible” languages (e.g., mirror-order or random-agreement versions of English), perplexity explodes and structure heads disappear—evidence that the models do encode natural-language constraints. • Psycholinguistic fit: The probability spikes LLMs assign to next-words predict human reading-time slow-downs (garden-paths, agreement attraction, etc.) almost as well as classic hand-built models. These empirical hooks are already informing syntax, acquisition, and typology research—hardly “nothing to say about language.”
- mattw1 1y ago[flagged]
- santoshalper 1y agoWhat's dangerous about him?
- hashuty 1y ago[flagged]
- retskrad 1y agoIt’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 1y ago[deleted]
- mmooss 1y agoWhere do you see 'elitist jargon'? That didn't even cross my mind.
- thomassmith65 1y agoI have problems with Noam Chomsky, but certainly none with his ability to communicate. He is a marvel at speaking extemporaneously in a precise and clear way.
- titzer 1y agoAll 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 and (probably) does not reason like our brains do, it somehow falls short? While there's some things in this I find myself nodding along to in this, I can't help but feel it's an a really old take that is super vague and hand-wavy. The truth is that all of the progress on machine learning is absolutely science. We understand extremely well how to make neural networks learn efficiently; it's why the data leads anywhere at all. Backpropagation and gradient descent are extraordinarily powerful. Not to mention all the "just engineering" of making chips crunch incredible amounts of numbers. Chomsky is extremely ungenerous to the progress and also pretty flippant about what this stuff can do. I think we should probably stop listening to Chomsky; he hasn't said anything here that he hasn't already say a thousand times for decades.
- l5870uoo9y 1y agoPerhaps it should be mentioned that he is 96 years old.
- bicx 1y agoWow, he is, isn’t he. I hope I’m this coherent when I’m 96.
- lxgr 1y ago> [...] 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".
- lostmsu 1y agoI think GPT-2 (2019) was already strong enough argument for possibility of modeling knowledge and language that Chomsky rejected.
- prpl 1y agoReminds me of SUSY, string theory, the standard model, and beyond that, string theory etc… What is elegant as a model is not always what works, and working towards a clean model to explain everything from a model that works is fraught, hard work. I don’t think anyone alive will realize true “AGI”, but it won’t matter. You don’t need it, the same way particle physics doesn’t need elegance
- newAccount2025 1y ago[flagged]
- Smaug123 1y agoFrom some Googling and use of Claude (and from summaries of the suggestively titled "Impossible Languages" by Moro linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar ), it looks like he's referring to languages which violate the laws which constrain the languages humans are innately capable of learning. But it's very unclear why "machine M is capable of learning more complex languages than humans" implies anything about the linguistic competence or the intelligence of machine M.
- foobarqux 1y agoIt doesn't, it just says that LLMs are not useful models of the human language faculty.
- specialist 1y agoThis is where I'm stuck. For other commentators, as I understand it, Chomsky's talking about well-defined grammar and language and production systems. Think Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach. Not "folk" understanding of language. I have no understanding or intuition, or even a finger nail grasp, for how an LLM generates, seemingly emulating, "sentences", as though created with a generative grammar. Is any one comparing and contrasting these two different techniques? Being noob, I wouldn't even know where to start looking. I've gleaned that someone(s) are using LLM/GPT to emit abstract syntax trees (vs a mere stream of tokens), to serve as input for formal grammars (eg programming source code). That sounds awesome. And something I might some day sorta understand. I've also gleaned that, given sufficient computing power, training data for future LLMs will have tokenized words (vs just character sequences). Which would bring the two strategies closer...? I have no idea. (Am noob, so forgive my poor use of terminology. And poor understanding of the tech, too.)
- 1y ago
- Orangeair 1y ago[2023]
- lanfeust6 1y agoI'm noticing that leftists overwhelmingly toe the same line on AI skepticism, which suggests to me an ideological motivation.
- Supermancho 1y ago> AI skepticism Isn't AI optimism an ideological motivation? It's a spectrum, not a mental model.
- lanfeust6 1y agoWhether one expects AI to be powerful or weak should have nothing to do with political slant, but here it seems to inform the opinion. It begs the question: what do they want to be true? The enemy is both too strong and too weak. They're firmly on one extreme end of the spectrum. I feel as though I'm somewhere in between.
- mattw1 1y agoI 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.
- santoshalper 1y agoI 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 true with GenAI, where the resources to construct a frontier model (or anything remotely close to it) are far outside what a hacker can afford.
- mattw1 1y agoThat makes sense, and there's definitely an element of truth to that position. The trouble is, the response is to dissociate with the technology, which is really not a tenable position if you intend to have a meaningful part in like... anything in the future. What I see-- and this is just my personal experience-- is that leftists tend to want to pretend it isn't happening, or that it won't matter. When it fact nothing matters more. The deepest of deep ironies: I talk to people all the time talking about ushering in an age of post-capitalism and ignoring AI. When I personally can't see how the AI of the next decade and capitalism can coexist, the latter being based on human labor and all. Like, AI is going to be the reason what you want is going to happen, so why ignore it?
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoI confess my opinion of Noam Chomsky dropped a lot from reading this interview. The way he set up a "Tom Jones" strawman and kept dismissing positions using language like "we'd laugh", "total absurdity", etc. was really disappointing. I always assumed that academics were only like that on reddit, and in real life they actually made a serious effort at rigorous argument, avoiding logical fallacies and the like. Yet here is Chomsky addressing a lay audience that has no linguistics background, and instead of even attempting to summarize the arguments for his position, he simply asserts that opposing views are risible with little supporting argument. I expected much more from a big-name scholar. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
- foobarqux 1y ago"Tom Jones" isn't a strawman, Chomsky is addressing an actual argument in a published paper from Steven Piantadosi. He's using a pseudonym to be polite and not call him out by name. > instead of even attempting to summarize the arguments for his position.. He makes a very clear, simple argument, accessible to any layperson who can read. If you are studying insects what you are interested in is how insects do it not what other mechanisms you can come up with to "beat" insects. This isn't complicated.
- lostmsu 1y agoThat's understandable but irrelevant. Only a few people have major interest in how humans think exactly. But nearly everyone is hang on the question if the LLMs could think better.
- foobarqux 1y agoIt's not irrelevant, it's the core of the disconnect: The problem is that everyone is arguing as if they passionately care about how humans work when, as you say, they don't care at all. People should just recognize, as you have done, that they don't actually care about how the human language faculty works. It's baffling that they instead choose to make absurd arguments to defend fields they don't care one way or another about. When Chomsky says that LLMs aren't how the human faculty works it would be so easy to tell the truth and say "I don't care how the human language faculty works" and everyone can go focus on the things they are interested in, just as it would be easy for a GPS designer to say "I don't care how insect navigation works". There is no problem as long as you don't pretend to be caring about (this aspect of) science.
- asmeurer 1y agoIt's amusing that he argues (correctly) that "there is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top," but then claims that LLMs cannot tell us anything about language because they can learn "impossible languages" that infants cannot learn. Isn't that an anthropomorphic argument, saying that what a language is inherently defined by human cognition?
- tgv 1y agoWhen Chomsky says "language," he means "natural/human language," not e.g. /[ab]*/ or prime numbers.
- foobarqux 1y agoYes, studying human language is actually inherently defined by what humans do, just -- as he points out, if you could understand the article -- studying insect navigation is defined by what insects do and not what navigation systems human could design.
- LudwigNagasena 1y agoThat was a weird ride. He was asked whether AI will outsmart humans and went on a rant about philosophy of science seemingly trying to defend the importance of his research and culminated with some culture war commentary about postmodernism.
- dmvdoug 1y agoThere are lots of stories about Chomsky ranting and wielding his own disciplinary authority to maintain himself as center of the field.
- lucisferre 1y ago"The desert ants in my backyard have minuscule brains, but far exceed human navigational capacities, in principle, not just performance. There is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top." This quote brought to mind the very different technological development path of the spider species in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. They used pheromones to 'program' a race of ants to do computation.
- lostmsu 1y agoI don't know what he's talking about. Humans clearly outperform ants in navigation. Especially if you allow arbitrary markings on the terrain. Sounds like "ineffable nature" mumbo-jumbo.
- tpm 1y agoArbitrary markings on the terrain? Why not GPS, satellite photo etc? All of those are human inventions and we can navigate much better and in a broader set of environments than ants thanks to them.
- lostmsu 1y agoBecause I was making a stronger argument (strict vs relaxed requirements on humans) to preempt another nature mumbo-jumbo argument that GPS is not the same/cheating.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoIt is unfortunate opinion, because I personally hold Chomsky in fairly high regard and give most of his thoughts I am familiar with a reasonable amount of consideration if only because he could, I suppose in the olden days now, articulate his points well and make you question your own thought process. This no longer seems to be the case though as I found the linked article somewhat difficult to follow. I suppose age can get to anyone. Not that I am an LLM zealot. Frankly, some of the clear trajectory it puts humans on makes me question our futures in this timeline. But even if I am not a zealot, but merely an amused, but bored middle class rube, the serious issues with it ( privacy, detailed personal profiling that surpasses existing systems, energy use, and actual power of those who wield it ), I can see it being implemented everywhere with a mix of glee and annoyance. I know for a fact it will break things and break things hard and it will be people, who know how things actually work that will need to fix those. I will be very honest though. I think Chomsky is stuck in his internal model of the world and unable to shake it off. Even his arguments fall flat, because they don't fit the domain well. It seems like they should given that he practically made his name on syntax theory ( which suggests his thoughts should translate well into it ) and yet.. they don't. I have a minor pet theory on this, but I am still working on putting it into some coherent words.
- calibas 1y agoThe 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 dispute, this method works. I can give a computer instructions and it "understands" them in a way that wasn't possible before LLMs. The main debate now is over the semantics of words like "understanding" and whether or not an LLM is conscious in the same way as a human being (it isn't).
- krackers 1y agoRestricted to linguistics, LLM's supposed lack of understanding should be a non-sequitur. If the question is whether LLMs have formed a coherent ability to parse human languages, the answer is obviously yes. In fact not just human languages, as seen with multimodality the same transformer architecture seems to work well to model and generate anything with inherent structure. I'm surprised that he doesn't mention "universal grammar" once in that essay. Maybe it so happens that humans do have some innate "universal grammar" wired in by instinct but it's clearly not _necessary_ to be able to parse things. You don't need to set up some explicit language rules or generative structure, enough data and the model learns to produce it. I wonder if anyone has gone back and tried to see if you can extract out some explicit generative rules from the learned representation though. Since the "universal grammar" hypothesis isn't really falsifiable, at best you can hope for some generalized equivalent that's isomorphic to the platonic representation hypothesis and claim that all human language is aligned in some given latent representation, and that our brains have been optimized to be able to work in this subspace. That's at least a testable assumption, by trying to reverse engineer the geometry of the space LLMs have learned.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoCan 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 this is part of why it hallucinates? It doesn't understand concepts, it just spits out words - perhaps a parrot is a better metaphor?)
- oysterville 1y agoTwo year old interview should be labeled as such.
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- makeitshine 1y agoWhat does age have to do with understanding any of this? He has been developing new, and refining old theories, over decades. It's ridiculous to expect someone to stop purely because of age, or to think they need your protection from discussing their views.
- furyofantares 1y agoHuh, cool - these papers are from 2023, same year as the article. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06189 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06189 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10270 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10270 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18278 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18278
- atdt 1y agoThe level of intellectual engagement with Chomsky's ideas in the comments here is shockingly low. Surely, we are capable of holding these two thoughts: one, that the facility of LLMs is fantastic and useful, and two, that the major breakthroughs of AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution. That may change, particularly if the intelligence of LLMs proves to be analogous to our own in some deep way—a point that is still very much undecided. However, if the similarities are there, so is the potential for knowledge. We have a complete mechanical understanding of LLMs and can pry apart their structure, which we cannot yet do with the brain. And some of the smartest people in the world are engaged in making LLMs smaller and more efficient; it seems possible that the push for miniaturization will rediscover some tricks also discovered by the blind watchmaker. But these things are not a given.
- loveparade 1y ago> 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 make decisions. When CNNs learned to recognize faces through a series of hierarchical abstractions that make intuitive sense it's hard to deny the similarities to what we're doing as humans. Perhaps it's all just emergent properties of some messy evolved substrate. 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" which is similar to what we've been through with Physics. Theories often made the mistake of giving human observers some kind of special importance, which was later discovered to be the cause of theories not generalizing.
- kevinventullo 1y agoMaybe I am missing context, but it seems like he’s defending himself from the claim that we shouldn’t bother studying language acquisition and comprehension in humans because of LLM’s? Who would make such a claim? LLM’s are of course incredible, but it seems obvious that their mechanism is quite different than the human brain. I think the best you can say is that one could motivate lines of inquiry in human understanding, especially because we can essentially do brain surgery on an LLM in action in a way that we can’t with humans.
- suddenlybananas 1y agoSteven Piantadosi makes that argument.
- AIorNot 1y agoAs much as I think of Chomsky - his linguistics approach is outside looking in, ie observational speculation compared to the last few years of LLM based tokenization semantic spaces, embedding, deep learning and mechanistic interpretation, ie: Understanding Linguistics before LLMs: “We think Birds fly by flapping their wings” Understanding Linguistics Theories after LLMs: “Understanding the physics of Aerofoils and Bernoulli’s principle mean we can replicate what birds do”
- irrational 1y agoI 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.
- windexh8er 1y agoI'm rather confused by this statement. I've read a number of Chomsky pieces and have listened to him speak a number of times. To say his theories were all "not true" seems, to an extent, almost impossible. Care to expand on how his theories can be taught in such a binary way?
- largbae 1y agoGP may be referring to the idea that language is innate like an organ in the body/brain. The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe is a great read exploring Chomsky and other thinkers in this realm. It would have been great to see what he thought of LLMs too.
- dropofwill 1y agoGenerally what people are talking about are his universal grammar or generative syntax theories/approaches, which are foundational to how you approach many topics. Because you build your academic career based on specialization they are hotly contested (for the material reasons of jobs, funding, tenure, etc.). This leads to people who agree hiring each other and departments ‘circling the wagon’ on these issues. You’ll see this referred to as east vs west coast, but it’s not actually that clearly geographically delineated. So anyways, these are open questions that people do seriously discuss and study, but the politics of academia make it difficult and unfortunately this often trickles down to students.
- irrational 1y agoI’m speaking about his linguistic theories such as universal grammar.
- godelski 1y agoI think many people are missing the core of what Chomsky is saying. It is often easy to miscommunicate and I think this is primarily what is happening. I think the analogy he gives here really helps emphasize what he's trying to say. If you're only going to read one part, I think it is this: | I mentioned insect navigation, which is an astonishing achievement. Insect scientists have made much progress in studying how it is achieved, though the neurophysiology, a very difficult matter, remains elusive, along with evolution of the systems. The same is true of the amazing feats of birds and sea turtles that travel thousands of miles and unerringly return to the place of origin. | Suppose Tom Jones, a proponent of engineering AI, comes along and says: “Your work has all been refuted. The problem is solved. Commercial airline pilots achieve the same or even better results all the time.” | If even bothering to respond, we’d laugh. | Take the case of the seafaring exploits of Polynesians, still alive among Indigenous tribes, using stars, wind, currents to land their canoes at a designated spot hundreds of miles away. This too has been the topic of much research to find out how they do it. Tom Jones has the answer: “Stop wasting your time; naval vessels do it all the time.” | Same response. It is easy to look at metrics of performance and call things solved. But there's much more depth to these problems than our abilities to solve some task. It's not about just the ability to do something, the how matters. It isn't important that we are able to do better at navigating than birds or insects. Our achievements say nothing about what they do. This would be like saying we developed a good algorithm only my looking at it's ability to do some task. Certainly that is an important part, and even a core reason for why we program in the first place! But its performance tells us little to nothing about its implementation. The implementation still matters! Are we making good uses of our resources? Certainly we want to be efficient, in an effort to drive down costs. Are there flaws or errors that we didn't catch in our measurements? Those things come at huge costs and fundamentally limit our programs in the first place. The task performance tells us nothing about the vulnerability to hackers nor what their exploits will cost our business. That's what he's talking about. Just because you can do something well doesn't mean you have a good understanding. It's natural to think the two relate because understanding improves performance that that's primarily how we drive our education. But this is not a necessary condition and we have a long history demonstrating that. I'm quite surprised this concept is so contentious among programmers. We've seen the follies of using test driven development. Fundamentally, that is the same. There's more depth than what we can measure here and we should not be quick to presume that good performance is the same as understanding[0,1]. We KNOW this isn't true[2]. I agree with Chomsky, it is laughable. It is laughable to think that the man in The Chinese Room[3] must understand Chinese. 40 years in, on a conversation hundreds of years old. Surely we know you can get a good grade on a test without actually knowing the material. Hell, there's a trivial case of just having the answer sheet. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dhlvzh/geoffrey_hinton_says_in_the_old_days_ai_systems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dhlvzh/geoffr... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1o0TQzry8&t=449s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1o0TQzry8&t=449s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- ggm 1y agoAlways a polarising figure, responses here bisect along several planes. I am sure some come armed to disagree because of his life long affinity to left world view, others to defend because of his centrality to theories of language. I happen to agree with his view, so i came armed to agree and read this with a view in mind which I felt was reinforced. People are overstating the AGI qualities and misapplying the tool, sometimes the same people. In particular, the lack of theory, and scientific method means both we're, not learning much, and we've rei-ified the machine. I was disappointed nothing said of Norbert Weiner. A man who invented cybernetics and had the courage to stand up to the military industrial complex.
- papaver-somnamb 1y agoThere 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 them valuable to us. An index of the data fed into them, different from a Lucene or SQL DB index made from compsci algorithms & data structure primitives. Recognizable to Azimov's definition. And these LLMs feature no symbolic reasoning whatsoever within their computational substrate. What they do feature is a simple recursive model: Given the input so far, what is the next token? And they are thus enabled after training on huge amounts of input material. No inherent reasoning capabilities, no primordial ability to apply logic, or even infer basic axioms of logic, reasoning, thought. And therefore unrecognizable to Chomsky's definition. So our LLMs are a mere parlor trick. A one-trick pony. But the trick they do is oh-so vastly complicated, and very appealing to us, of practical application and real value. It harkens back to the question: What is the nature of intelligence? And how to define it? And I say this while thinking of the marked contrast of apparent intelligence between an LLM and say a 2-year age child.
- sdwr 1y agoThat'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.
- ggm 1y agoWhich 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)
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- jdkee 1y agoChomsky's own words. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
- foldr 1y agoMost 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.
- arp242 1y agoHe 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."
- foldr 1y agoGood point! It's useful to have a reference for this, thanks. It's obvious to anyone who's read some of Chomsky's work that he didn't write the NYT article, but I can understand why others might find this claim a bit implausible, given that his name is at the top of it.
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- jopicornell 1y agoI care what one of the most famous philosophers and thinkers of our times says. He's not the most up to date, but calling him an idiot positions you politically and intellectually.
- guappa 1y agoI agree, why did you decide to comment anyway then?
- dragochat 1y ago...for the lulz try asking ChatGPT "what is Chomsky (still) good for?"
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- zombot 1y agoThe 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.
- OccamsMirror 1y agoDon't forget exerting control through automated surveillance. What a wonderful tool we have created for detecting whether citizens step out of line without needing giant offices full of analysts.
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- Xmd5a 1y agohttps://magazine.caltech.edu/post/math-language-marcolli-noam-chomsky https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/math-language-marcolli-noa... These days, Chomsky is working on Hopf algebras (originally from quantum physics) to explain language structure.
- visarga 1y agoBrains 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.
- suddenlybananas 1y agoIt'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.
- qwery 1y agoYou could say that languages developed ("evolved") to fit the indisputable human biological faculty for language.
- Amadiro 1y agoIn my view, there is a major flaw in his argument is his distinction into pure engineering and science: > We can make a rough distinction between pure engineering and science. There is no sharp boundary, but it’s a useful first approximation. Pure engineering seeks to produce a product that may be of some use. Science seeks understanding. If the topic is human intelligence, or cognitive capacities of other organisms, science seeks understanding of these biological systems. If you take this approach, of course it follows that we should laugh at Tom Jones. But a more differentiated approach is to recognize that science also falls into (at least) two categories; the science that we do because it expands our capability into something that we were previously incapable of, and the one that does not. (we typically do a lot more of the former than the latter, for obvious practical reasons) Of course it is interesting from a historical perspective to understand the seafaring exploits of Polynesians, but as soon as there was a better way of navigating (i.e. by stars or by GPS) the investigation of this matter was relegated to the second type of science, more of a historical kind of investigation. Fundamentally we investigate things in science that are interesting because we believe the understanding we can gain from it can move us forwards somehow. Could it be interesting to understand how Hamilton was thinking when he came up with imaginary numbers? Sure. Are a lot of mathematicians today concerning themselves with studying this? No, because the frontier has been moved far beyond.* When you take this view, it´s clear that his statement > 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. is not warranted. Consider the following, in his own analogy: > These considerations bring up a minor problem with the current GPS enthusiasm: its total absurdity, as in the hypothetical cases where we recognize it at ones. But there are much more serious problems than absurdity. One is that GPS systems are designed in such a way that they cannot tell us anything about navigation, planning routes or other aspects of orientation, a matter of principle, irremediable. * I´m making a simplifying assumption here that we can´t learn anything useful for modern navigation anymore from studying Polynesians or ants; this might well be untrue, but that is also the case for learning something about language from LLMs, which according to Chomsky is apparently impossible and not even up for debate.
- unkulunkulu 1y ago
- teleforce 1y ago>Many biological organisms surpass human cognitive capacities in much deeper ways. The desert ants in my backyard have minuscule brains, but far exceed human navigational capacities, in principle, not just performance. There is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top. Chomsky made interesting points regarding the performance of AI with the performance of biological organisms in comparison to human but his conclusion is not correct. We already know that cheetah run faster human and elephant is far stronger than human. Bat can navigate in the dark with echo location and dolphin can hunt in synchronization with high precision coordination in pack to devastating effect compared to silo hunting. Whether we like or not human is the the top unlike the claim of otherwise by Chomsky. By scientific discovery (understanding) and designing (engineering) by utilizing law of nature, human can and has surpassed all of the cognitive capabilities of these petty animals, and we're mostly responsible for their inevitable demise and extinction. Human now need to collectively and consciously reverse the extinction process of these "superior" cognitive animals in order to preserve these animals for better or worst. No other earth bound creature can do that to us.
- bawana 1y agoI once heard that a roomful of monkeys with typewriters given infinite time could type out the works of shakespeare. I dont think that's true any more than the random illumiination of pixels on a screen could eventually generate a picture. OTOH, consider LLMs as a roomful of monkeys that can communicate to each other, look at words,sentences and paragraphs on posters around the room with a human in the room that gives them a banana when they type out a new word, sentence or paragraph. You may eventually get a roomful of monkeys that can respond to a new sentence you give them with what seems an intelligent reply. And since language is the creation of humans, it represents an abstraction of the world made by humans.
- ashoeafoot 1y agoChat Gpt can write great apolgia for blood thirsty landempires and never live that down : "To characterize a structural analysis of state violence as “apologia” reveals more about prevailing ideological filters than about the critique itself. If one examines the historical record without selective outrage, the pattern is clear—and uncomfortable for all who prefer myths to mechanisms." the fake academic facade, the us diabolism, the unwillingness to see complexity and responsibility in other its all with us forever ..
- r00sty 1y agoI imagine his opinions might have changed by now. If we're still residing in 2023, I would be inclined to agree with him. Today, in 2025 however, LLMs are just another tool being used to "reduce labor costs" and extract more profit from the humans left who have money. There will be no scientific developments if things continue in this manner.
- mrmdp 1y agoChomsky has the ability to say things in a way that most laypersons of average intelligence can grasp. That is an important skill for communication of one's thoughts to the general populace. Many of the comments herein lack that feature and seem to convey that the author might be full of him(her)self. Also, some of the comment are a bit pejorative.
- caycep 1y agoIs Chomsky really "one of the most esteemed public intellectuals of all time"? Aristotle and Beyoncé might want to have a word