> "The world’s preeminent linguist Noam Chomsky, and one of the most esteemed public intellectuals of all time, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, tackles these nagging questions in the interview that follows."
No matter how accomplished and famous you are, maybe don't describe yourself like that on your own website. Why? If it's really true then it certainly doesn't need to be said. And if you still feel the need to say it then maybe it's not true?
Chomsky is always saying that LLMs and such can only imitate, not understand language. But I wonder if there is a degree of sophistication at which he would concede these machines exceed "imitation". If his point is that LLMs arrive at language in a way different than humans... great. But I'm not sure how he can argue that some kind of extremely sophisticated understanding of natural language is not embedded in these models in a way that, at this point, exceeds the average human. In all fairness, this was written in 2023, but given his longstanding stubbornness on this topic, I doubt it would make a difference.
msh · 10m ago
He should just surrender and give chatgpt whatever land it wants.
bigyabai · 6m ago
Manufactured intelligence to modulate a world of manufactured consent!
I agree with the rest of these comments though, listening to Chomsky wax about the topic-du-jour is a bit like trying to take lecture notes from the Swedish Chef.
No matter how accomplished and famous you are, maybe don't describe yourself like that on your own website. Why? If it's really true then it certainly doesn't need to be said. And if you still feel the need to say it then maybe it's not true?
I agree with the rest of these comments though, listening to Chomsky wax about the topic-du-jour is a bit like trying to take lecture notes from the Swedish Chef.