Isn't AI optimism an ideological motivation? It's a spectrum, not a mental model.
An equivalent observation might be that the only people who seem really, really excited about current AI products are grifters who want to make money selling it. Which looks a lot like Blockchain to many.
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.
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?
They're firmly on one extreme end of the spectrum. I feel as though I'm somewhere in between.
That framing may be true within tech circles, not the broader political divide. "Hackers" aren't collectively discounting and ignoring AI tools regardless of their enthusiasm for open-source.
Safety-ism is also most popular among those see useful potential in AI, and a generous enough timeline for AGI.
I was quite dismissive of him on LLMs until I realized the utter hubris and stupidity of dismissing Chomsky on language.
I think it was someone asking if he was familiar with the Wittgenstein Blue and Brown books and of course because he as already an assistant professor at MIT when they came out.
I still chuckle at my own intellectual arrogance and stupidity when thinking about how I was dismissive of Chomsky on language. I barely know anything and I was being dismissive of one of unquestionable titans and historic figures of a field.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-c...
But at least he admits that:
Chomsky introduced his theory of language acquisition, according to which children have an inborn quality of being biologically encoded with a universal grammar
Usually what happens is the information bubble bursts, and gets corrected, or it just fades out.
For Chomsky specifically, the entire existence of LLM, however it's framed, is a massive middle finger to him and a strike-through on a large part of his academic career. As much as I find his UG theory and its supporters irritating, it might be felt a bit unfair to someone his age.
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.
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.
However, we now have a proof-of-concept that a computer can learn grammar in a sophisticated way, from the ground up.
We have yet to code something procedural that approaches the same calibre via a hard-coded universal grammar.
That may not obliterate Chomksy's position, but it looks bad.
Again, that LLMs can learn to compose sophisticated texts from training alone does not close the case on Chomsky's position.
However, it is a piece of evidence against it. It does suggest, by Occam's razor, that a hardwired universal grammar is the lesser theory.
LLM had really destroyed Chomsky's positions in multiple different ways: nothing perform even close to LLM in language generation, yet it didn't grow a UG for natural languages, while it did develop a shared logic for non-natural languages and abstract concepts, while dataset needing to be heavily English biased to be English fluent, and parameter count needing to be truly massive as multiple hundred billion parameters large, so on and on.
Those are all circumstantial evidences at best, a random paraphernalia of statements that aren't even appropriate to bring into discussions, all meaningless - in the sense that an open hand of a person observing another individual aligned to a line between standing position of the person to the center of nearest opening of a wall would be meaningless.
Do you even understand Chomsky's position?
To me this text look like his Baghdad Bob moment. Silly but right and noble. What else is it?
Ironically these days you can just throw this text at ChatGPT to have it debloat or critique text like this transcripts. Worse results than taking time reading yourself, but gives you validation if that is what is needed.