> 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...

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.