zlacker

>>mef+(OP)
I'm noticing that leftists overwhelmingly toe the same line on AI skepticism, which suggests to me an ideological motivation.

>>lanfeu+f6
Chomsky's problem here has nothing to do with his politics, but unfortunately a lot to do with his long-held position in the Nature/Nurture debate - a position that is undermined by the ability of LLMs to learn language without hardcoded grammatical rules:

  Chomsky introduced his theory of language acquisition, according to which children have an inborn quality of being biologically encoded with a universal grammar

https://psychologywriting.com/skinner-and-chomsky-on-nature-...

>>thomas+AU
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.

>>js8+Au1
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.