posted on March 09, 2023 04:36 PM by
u/completely-ineffable
40
u/wholetyouinhere45 pointsat 1678383853.000000
I always thought of Chomsky as an immortal cultural force /
institution. But seeing that number there… “94”, is a bit of a wake-up
call. It’s a miracle that he’s still around.
has some influence in mathematics and formal languages. was surprised when I saw him in the textbook. But being expert doesn't mean they can predict future.
In this piece Chomsky, the intellectual godfather of an effort that
failed for 60 years to build machines that can converse in ordinary
language, condemns the effort that succeeded.
Did Chomsky try to build an AI? FWIW, context free grammars and
Chomsky normal form are still taught in compsci classes (speaking from
experience here).
No Chomsky's program has never had any sort of ambition to build an AI. Chomsky wants to characterize the human capacity for language, not anything about AIs.
Chomsky has said literally since the late 1950s that machine processing of language in any significant way, especially in the way that AI people have suggested, is impossible. Many people have tried to use Chomskyan models to build language processing tools, and they are of some use in analyzing language but not generally in producing language. But producing language (creatively, not just something like translating in a mechanistic sense) is a huge part of what Chomsky sees as the human language capacity.
That part of Scott's essay struck me especially funny, given that Chomsky himself has always been abundantly clear that he does NOT see his work as providing a basis for anything like AI (really) getting a (human) language capacity. Here's a famous & pretty good interview with him saying this stuff in 2012, and you can find comments on this in his work going as far back as you like, though not always quite as detailed as this: [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/)
>machine processing of language in any significant way, especially in the way that AI people have suggested, is impossible.
He's still completely correct on this point, it bears mentioning. LLMs etc like what have recently become so much a topic of debate aren't actually producing language in the creative sense, and there is no conceptual standpoint under which they ever *could* by our present understanding and usage of computing technology. They aren't a stepping stone or a precursor, either- they're completely unrelated to actual cognition in a human-relatable sense.
Humans create language as a way of relaying abstractions we perceive in our mind, or concoct mentally, etc- the language arises *from* these abstractions and the need to relate them, make reference to them, describe them to others, etc. This is the fundamental basis for all human communication- the actual words are important, of course, but what's more significant is *why* those words were used and what abstractions lie in the mind of the speaker/writer that are causing them to create the words in response.
Without independent, abstract cognition taking place that requires linguistic description, any emissions of words are *just* that- emissions of words that might appear to mean something if you squint a little. That's why LLMs can make fake scientific papers that sound truthy, but have no relationship to the real world as such.
It's wild that so many grifters and *"thinkers"* keep discussing AI/AGI and modern language models in the same breath, because it just reveals how poorly they grasp the inherent nature of what they're talking about. I guess if the goal is grifting, ironically, one is better off acting just like an LLM, stringing various words together to attract a desired result.
Sorry nevermind I came back and read that more carefully and it seems like you're saying that LLMs in particular can't use language no matter how much we scale them up, rather than our current technology in general. I completely agree with that, so my bad !
That's well explained and I agree with almost everything but isn't the original claim a bit strong ? I mean it sounds correct that if we could build something that truly used language it would be an AGI, and it is certainly true that the latest wave of things we built don't really represent progress in that direction to my knowledge. That said, I haven't heard anyone say that an AGI is technically impossible, and I wouldn't be confident about what happens if you scale up the kind of neural network we have arbitrarily high.
His theory of language extends beyond his hierarchy. IIRC he prominently postulated that all language comes from an innate language ability called 'merge' - see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics) .
Not quite right. The latest claim under "Minimalism" (what you are referring to), says that a lot of cognitive and physiological stuff goes into language, but the only thing that is intensional and unique to human language is the merge operation. I don't think he is right about that either, but the basic idea is sound: language emerges from an interaction of domain general and domain specific capacities, and linguists should be clear to themselves about what is domain specific (if anything).
Chomsky's contribution to the mathematics of formal languages is a rather small part of his theoretical contribution. The computability hierarchy known as Chomsky's hierarchy comes from his work with Schutzenberger in the 1960s, but he has rather drifted from this kind of work since.
I confess to being surprised by the level of anger directed at this
little post. To my mind, Chomsky was nasty and vicious utterly without
justification, in the pages of the New York Times no less, in attacking
one of the major engineering accomplishments of our time — an
accomplishment that could only be called unimpressive by people who’ve
forgotten that they might’ve called it impossible a decade ago. And
despite this being my personal blog, I was less nasty in the defense
than he was in the attack.
“Oh no, I’ve received pushback from people more knowledgeable than me
in an area outside of my expertise! How nasty!”
Maybe he's feeling insecure. He's an algorithmic complexity expert who is, for some reason, doing a stint at a machine learning company. It might be the first time in a while that he's frequently interacting with smart people about a technical subject and he's actually the least knowledgeable person in the room.
That reminds me when he felt threatened by some far away people expressing mild criticism of TCS dominance in the US academia as causing neglect of some other practical areas of CS. In a classic Aaronsonism he came up with a whole imagined front of "anti-complexitism" and pontificated how anti-intellectual it was not to be pleased by TCS and a follower.
That was several years ago. Many prominent computational complexity researchers young and old have since switched to machine learning, proving something I guess. (He's actually trailing them there).
So I'd say he's not feeling insecure personally, but the way some dominant groups from some parts of the spectrum just tend to have that persecution complex whatever they do. (I can tell you nothing technical intimidates him, he's actually proud of his ignorance regarding both mathematics and programming, boasting how he became CS prof knowing mostly just sophomoric linear algebra and QBasic).
>If ChatGPT is such a mind-boggling engineering achievement with as many revolutionary future applications as Aaronson imagines, then why is he so bothered by a critique?
because like the whole rationalist project, OpenAI is built on a reduction of human experience to machine processes, one that papers over the role of emotion, affect, and relationality in human experience. in that papering over goes a huge amount of aggression, whose existence all the rationalists dismiss while also displaying uncanny amounts of it. any challenge to their reductionist view, based on easily observable facts about the world that so many of us have been pointing at forever, unleashes that same aggression--that aggression that, as Bayesian machines only seeking to validate rational priors, they *definitely* do not have!
Last week, Scott Aaronson banned a commenter for "sneering" at him, and someone else had to politely explain to Aaronson he was overreacting, and so the commenter then got unbanned.
My ex-therapist kindly called this condition your threat meter being out of whack. (Due to traumas, etc.)
And now he's accusing Chomsky of sneering.
> an accomplishment that could only be called unimpressive by people who've forgotten that they might've called it impossible a decade ago.
If I had a nickel for every time a Scott Computers remark led me to think, "Hey, I wrote a science-fiction story about that when I was a teenager in the '90s," I'd have [two nickels](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/vf9u4h/comment/icupne0/?context=3). This was only a short story, though, about a near future where computers wrote and performed pop music. Think "boy bands are fake" but spun out by a kid who has read Asimov and used ELIZA. And published in the high-school literary magazine.
Mischaracterizes Chomsky’s work, his positions, and offers his own
highly suspect and inexpert view of what language is instead. (And I’m
not a huge fan of Chomsky’s work, but I’ll credit his views on language
a million times before Scott Aa’s.) THEN discloses he works for Open AI.
Nothing to see here.
Not sure im a fan of Aaronsonism (that is when you disagree with
somebody and you just call it an ism to make it seem like you are
fighting against more than you are).
(yes, there is also the ‘Chomskyism ideology’ but that isn’t what he
is railing against here. So don’t waste your time telling me that
followers of Aaronson)
Scotts reaction to 1) just shows that [Peter Watts Blindsight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel\)) fried a few brains.
Spoiler for parts of the book(s): >!A plot point/assumption of the book is that consciousness isn't/doesnt have to be a vital part of intelligence, and things can be intelligent (and be a big threat to humanity) without consciousness. They discover that this is the case with both the alien object they are exploring, but also the enslaved vampires on earth who at the end of the book take over the earth/revolt, as suddenly all cultural broadcasts stop (implying that culture/art is a side effect of consciousness or something). A good professor/researcher would have made these implicit assumptions about intelligence and consciousness more explicit in an reply to their blog (or at least noticed them). But yeah, they are also sort of open philosophical questions and not tech ones so out of his wheelhouse!<
All of Michael's comments here are good. I think this one is especially important [https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7094#comment-1947283](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7094#comment-1947283)
This seems to be a hot take about large language models written by
somebody who doesn’t understand them, in response to a hot take about
large language models written by somebody else who also doesn’t
understand them.
Oddly I kind of agree with both of them. The sneerable thing here is
the defensiveness of Scott Aaron’s post. Chomsky et al may not
understand large language models but the deficiencies that they point
out are real. I wonder if Scott Aaronson is defensive because he doesn’t
have a good or interesting response to the original article’s
observations?
The whole “say super inflammatory statements in the post and then
only correct them when challenged in the comments” routine is starting
to feel more like intellectual dishonesty than sloppiness now
This is exactly why this is the worst of the Scotts. Instead of
having One Weird Color (beige) that nets him a Substack sweetheart deal
that will fail to renew sooner than either imagined, worst Scott is
actually very smart and knows exactly what he’s doing here. He doesn’t
care if his ship gets dashed on the rocks of Chomsky’s best and most
enduring work.
Can anyone with proper knowledge of the subject link me to a critique
of Chomsky’s ideas that’s made by actual real cognitive scientists or
linguists? I have already read Peter Norvig’s debate with Chomsky and it
seems like Norvig doesn’t really understand what Chomsky is saying or is
arguing against a strawman. It definitely doesn’t seem like the ML/AI
people understand what Chomsky is saying either - but they also don’t
care; their goal is to sell APIs not understand language.
Look into Tomasello, and Martin Haspelmath for some of the more intense debates, but I will advance that it's kinda frustrating to try to pin down to details.
The crux of the problems is this. The assumptions of Chomskian linguistics have changed quite a bit from its meteoric rise to current views, but in broad way to encompass all of it, I would characterise them as:
- i) The human species has an innate ability to acquire language;
- ii) While specific languages vary, there are some traits common to the whole species;
- iii) It is the task of linguistics to formally define the specifics of this species-wide ability.
i) is self-evident and ii) is true by definition, therefore unfalsifiable. There's a lot of misunderstanding about Chomky's "universal grammar" but it's really just a fancy way of saying "whatever we find to be common to all languages". If you find a new datum X that was previously thought impossible, that doesn't falsify universal grammar; rather, you proved that universal grammar is able to do X.
The only point left to debate is iii). Chomskian linguistics in practice means abstracting away, often with open contempt, the kind of work that other linguists do; comparative typology, for example, becomes "butterfly collecting", mere aggregation of trivia that amounts to nothing of value; since what "real linguists" do isn't to document, preserve, or increase the understanding of minority languages, but to analyse the underlying ability common to everyone—real linguists don't study languages, they study Language. Historical linguistics and sociolinguistics become contradictions; real linguists care about "i-Language" (the mechanisms internal to the individual's mind and thought processes) rather than "e-language" (externalised language as a social convention that evolves, intermixes with others etc.). Phonetics is mere surface detail; writing systems are merely a recording technology, unrelated to the innate ability; corpus linguistics is so much noise (it's mere "performance", unreliable data when your goal is to investigate pure "competence"); second language acquisition is by definition excluded from linguistics, since it loses the critical period where the apparatus of Language is plain to see…
As you can imagine, this strict definition of the true goal of linguistics hasn't been very popular outside of Chomskian circles. In practice what it boils down to is that practitioners of Chomkian linguistics will dedicate themselves to analysing very specific phenomena, often in syntax and typically drawing from the researcher's own grammatical intuitions, in minute detail, through an abstraction apparatus all but impenetrable to non-initiates, postulating opaque underlying forms that can't really be proven or disproven. For everybody else the kind of questions that they're trying to solve just aren't interesting questions; a feeling Chomskian linguists reciprocate.
---
This Great Schism in American linguistics ultimately derives from Chomky´s… Rationalism. No, really, Chomsky is a vocal Rationalist and everything else derives from that. We're not talking of Lesswrong rationalism but the grownup version, which, amusingly enough, is more or less its opposite: the philosophical position that not all knowledge is based on data or external input, but much of it comes from the mind, from first principles and innate knowledge and subjective considerations. The opposite view is empiricism, which Chomsky dismisses as naïve and obviously wrong. Thus the practice of working from subjective intuition and dedicating most of one's time to complex abstractions; and thus the corresponding contempt for data, corpora, statistics, the readiness to brush away mismatching data as irrelevant noise; given strict Rationalism, that's not just unproblematic, it's the definition of science.
TIL, I might be a Grownup Rationalist.
Do you know of a good book/essay/lecture that discusses Chomsky's philosophy of science? I do know he's talked about it simply before such as how science would never progress if it set about studying bees by taking hundreds of videos of bees dancing, etc., but I've only seen him mention these things in an off-hand sort of way.
From a third-party, check out Stich's "Between Chomskian Rationalism and Popperian Empiricism", https://www.jstor.org/stable/687543 .
From the man's own pen, there's this excerpt from "Language and Responsibility": https://chomsky.info/responsibility02/ .
You might also be interested in the Stanford encyclopedia's discussion of rationalism vs. empiricism:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
I dropped out of academia so I don't know what's going on these days but I'm sure the fine people at [r/askphilosophy](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy) would recommend you more good stuff!
You could probably fill several library shelves with the number of criticism made by linguists against Chomsky's ideas, because Chomsky's career started in the 1950s and is not quite over yet, because he has been extremely prominent in the field since the 1960s, and because he has never met a controversy he doesn't like. The quality is obviously very uneven, however.
i realized this guy was a bit silly when he started a blog post like
“we all know that rational agents eventually converge to equilibrium, so
why is there still conflict between israel and palestine?”
he was being flippant in tone, yes, but he also meant it sincerely.
after a double-take, i suddenly stopped caring about Scott Aaronson had
to say that wasn’t directly about complexity theory.
Oh, he’s working at OpenAI now. The thing that scares me most about
“AI” is the kind of people who are working on “AI”.
God, he links to a Bing-generated rebuttal that misquotes and
misunderstands the Chomsky article, and the smug asshole who generated
it leads an ML team at MS I want to curl up and die.
I can’t believe it! “Several commenters” are here and OH MY GOD they
have a steel chair!!!
Some vague group of Cambridge culture warriors (or quite possibly
pranksters, with a long history between Harvard and MIT) has taken
UMBRAGE with Scott Aa. for his lewd comment:
I’ll be busy all day at the Harvard CS department, where I’m giving a
quantum talk this afternoon.
Scott Aa. pontificates:
Several commenters complained that they found this sentence
“condescending,” but I’m not sure what exactly they wanted me to
say—that I was visiting some school in Cambridge, MA, two T stops from
the school where Chomsky works and I used to work?]
and he actually did the “well have you considered that a lot of people are also actually just statistical imitations of intelligence? no, really, have you?!” thing…
Oh damn I didn’t even see the comments. Aaronson says this:
The discovery of just how much of humans’ language understanding can
be simulated by a probabilistic autocomplete is entirely comparable in
magnitude to the discovery of the moons of Jupiter
It really isn’t, though. Transformer
models are Turing complete. If you make them big enough they can
compute literally anything. I feel like this is something he should
know?
if he is actually suggesting that LLMs are simulating "human language understanding", that would be a stronger (or at least different) claim than ACT could make. he seems to be at least _implying_ that LLMs process language "the same way we do".
this seems like a bold, nearly metaphysical, claim however. i hope that's not what he means.
My interpretation was that he was expressing just basic astonishment that "probabilistic autocomplete" actually works for simulating language. Not that it does it in the same way, but that the input/output relationship is almost indistinguishable.
Which strikes me as weird because it seems obvious that, if you know that transformers are turing complete, then of course they can simulate the way that humans use language. Because they can simulate any kind of input/output relationship.
I think he really means that LLMs are a valid model for how humans do language since he takes umbrage with Chomsky for claiming LLMs do not learn how humans do (point 2), and therein makes a very vague parenthetical about LLMs "illuminating at least one component of the human language faculty [of] predictive coding." (whatever that means.)
This isn't an algorithmic claim; it's a claim in linguistics and/or psychology and/or neuroscience, and a ridiculous one.
Also it's amusing to contrast Scott's defense of LLMs with OpenAI's engineers' claims that chatGPT is trivial and uninteresting.
> The discovery of just how much of humans' language understanding can be simulated by a probabilistic autocomplete is
... the hot new thing in epicycles!
This comment section is not a free speech zone. It’s my, Scott
Aaronson’s, virtual living room. Commenters are expected not to say
anything they wouldn’t say in my actual living room. This means: No
trolling. No ad-hominems against me or others. (emphasis
added)
Chomsky and his minions are criticizing us because they are jealous
and angry of our successes.
I think Chomsky’s take on AI is incredibly stupid.
Chomsky is correct when he says that the way ChatGPT processes
language is very different from the way human’s process language. But
Chomsky is completely incorrect if he thinks that this places any kind
of limitations on what ChatGPT can do.
The way a plane flies is very different from the way a bird flies,
but nonetheless a plane can fly much faster than a bird. Similarly,
large language models do not need to mimic human intelligence to surpass
it.
Large language models do not resolve any linguistic or philosophical
questions about how human language works, but they will majorly disrupt
many parts of society.
I always thought of Chomsky as an immortal cultural force / institution. But seeing that number there… “94”, is a bit of a wake-up call. It’s a miracle that he’s still around.
Did Chomsky try to build an AI? FWIW, context free grammars and Chomsky normal form are still taught in compsci classes (speaking from experience here).
from way down in the comments lol:
“Oh no, I’ve received pushback from people more knowledgeable than me in an area outside of my expertise! How nasty!”
Mischaracterizes Chomsky’s work, his positions, and offers his own highly suspect and inexpert view of what language is instead. (And I’m not a huge fan of Chomsky’s work, but I’ll credit his views on language a million times before Scott Aa’s.) THEN discloses he works for Open AI. Nothing to see here.
Not sure im a fan of Aaronsonism (that is when you disagree with somebody and you just call it an ism to make it seem like you are fighting against more than you are).
(yes, there is also the ‘Chomskyism ideology’ but that isn’t what he is railing against here. So don’t waste your time telling me that followers of Aaronson)
this comment spits some hot fire
…
This seems to be a hot take about large language models written by somebody who doesn’t understand them, in response to a hot take about large language models written by somebody else who also doesn’t understand them.
Oddly I kind of agree with both of them. The sneerable thing here is the defensiveness of Scott Aaron’s post. Chomsky et al may not understand large language models but the deficiencies that they point out are real. I wonder if Scott Aaronson is defensive because he doesn’t have a good or interesting response to the original article’s observations?
The whole “say super inflammatory statements in the post and then only correct them when challenged in the comments” routine is starting to feel more like intellectual dishonesty than sloppiness now
This is exactly why this is the worst of the Scotts. Instead of having One Weird Color (beige) that nets him a Substack sweetheart deal that will fail to renew sooner than either imagined, worst Scott is actually very smart and knows exactly what he’s doing here. He doesn’t care if his ship gets dashed on the rocks of Chomsky’s best and most enduring work.
Can anyone with proper knowledge of the subject link me to a critique of Chomsky’s ideas that’s made by actual real cognitive scientists or linguists? I have already read Peter Norvig’s debate with Chomsky and it seems like Norvig doesn’t really understand what Chomsky is saying or is arguing against a strawman. It definitely doesn’t seem like the ML/AI people understand what Chomsky is saying either - but they also don’t care; their goal is to sell APIs not understand language.
i realized this guy was a bit silly when he started a blog post like “we all know that rational agents eventually converge to equilibrium, so why is there still conflict between israel and palestine?”
he was being flippant in tone, yes, but he also meant it sincerely. after a double-take, i suddenly stopped caring about Scott Aaronson had to say that wasn’t directly about complexity theory.
maybe he’s just wonderstruck by his new gig.
Oh, he’s working at OpenAI now. The thing that scares me most about “AI” is the kind of people who are working on “AI”.
God, he links to a Bing-generated rebuttal that misquotes and misunderstands the Chomsky article, and the smug asshole who generated it leads an ML team at MS I want to curl up and die.
I can’t believe it! “Several commenters” are here and OH MY GOD they have a steel chair!!!
Some vague group of Cambridge culture warriors (or quite possibly pranksters, with a long history between Harvard and MIT) has taken UMBRAGE with Scott Aa. for his lewd comment:
Scott Aa. pontificates:
DEVELOPING!@!!!
[deleted]
Oh damn I didn’t even see the comments. Aaronson says this:
It really isn’t, though. Transformer models are Turing complete. If you make them big enough they can compute literally anything. I feel like this is something he should know?
okay then.
I think Chomsky’s take on AI is incredibly stupid.
Chomsky is correct when he says that the way ChatGPT processes language is very different from the way human’s process language. But Chomsky is completely incorrect if he thinks that this places any kind of limitations on what ChatGPT can do.
The way a plane flies is very different from the way a bird flies, but nonetheless a plane can fly much faster than a bird. Similarly, large language models do not need to mimic human intelligence to surpass it.
Large language models do not resolve any linguistic or philosophical questions about how human language works, but they will majorly disrupt many parts of society.
I mean I hate chomsky for being a genocide denying pseudoleft hack but thats probably not why this dude hates him