As someone having worked in natural language processing for nearly twenty years, I understand where you are coming from with this jab at Chomsky, but it is ultimately a misrepresentation of his work and position. Chomsky has to the best of my knowledge never showed any interest in building intelligent machines as he does not view this as a science. Here is a fairly recent interview (2023) with him where he outlines his position well [1]. I should also note that I am saying this as someone that spent the first half of their career constantly defending their choice of statistical and then deep learning approaches from objections from people who were (are?) very sympathetic to Chomsky's views.

[1]: https://chomsky.info/20230503-2

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visarga 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Chomsky's innate grammar misses the larger process - is it not more likely that languages that can't be learned by babies don't survive? Learnability might be the outcome of language evolution. The brain did not have time to change so much since the dawn of our species.

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weatherlite 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Chomsky has to the best of my knowledge never showed any interest in building intelligent machines as he does not view this as a science

Right, only what Chomsky works on is true science, unlike the intelligent systems pseudo science bullshit people like Geoff Hinton, Bengio or Demis Hassabis work on...

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ninjin 2 days ago | parent [-]

If you read the interview and walk away with that impression I will be amazed. You may not like his distinction between science and engineering, but he admits it is somewhat arbitrary and as someone that is solidly in the deep learning camp his criticism is not entirely unfair, even if I disagree with it and will not change my own course.

Personally, I find it somewhat amazing that you put Demis on that list given that he, himself, on very good accounts that I have, explicitly pushed back against natural language processing (and thus large language model) development at DeepMind for the longest of times and they had to play major catch up once it became obvious that their primarily reinforcement learning-oriented and "foundational" approaches were not showing as much promise as what OpenAI and Facebook were producing. Do not get me wrong, what he has accomplished is utterly amazing, but he certainly is not a father of large language models.

	▲	weatherlite 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> If you read the interview and walk away with that impression I will be amazed. I have not, but I have watched him talk about this things many times and he always seemed too sure of himself and too dismissive of LLMs, I now believe he's simply wrong.