zlacker

>>mef+(OP)
All 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.

>>titzer+S5
> But you couldn't explain your brain from principles or its architecture, you'd need all of neuroscience to do it

That's not a good argument. Neuroscience was constructed by (other) brains. The brain is trying to explain itself.

> The truth is that all of the progress on machine learning is absolutely science.

But not much if you're interested in finding out how our brain works, or how language works. One of the interesting outcomes of LLMs is that there apparently is a way to represent complex ideas and their linguistic connection in a (rather large) unstructured state, but it comes without thorough explanation or relation to the human brain.

> Chomsky is [...] pretty flippant about what this stuff can do.

True, that's his style, being belligerently verbose, but others have been pretty much fawning and drooling over a stochastic parrot with a very good memory, mostly with dollar signs in their eyes.