Hinton on Chomsky

First Reactions (Interview with Adam Smith)

October 8, 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-icD_KmvnnM 

(5:20)

“So there is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks that its complete nonsense to say that these things understand. That they don’t process language at all in the same way as we do. I think that school is wrong. I think it’s clear now that neural nets are much better at processing language that anything ever produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics. But there is still a lot of debate about that, particularly among linguists.”

CBMM10 Panel: Research on Intelligence in the Age of AI

November 20, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-w_n9NJIE 

(38:30)

“So there’s this crazy guy at MIT called Chomsky who has been claiming it’s all innate. We know now that doesn’t have to be the case. And Chomsky’s whole view of language is kind of crazy when you look back on it because language is about conveying meaning. Its’ about conveying stuff. And Chomsky kind of ignored that aspect of it. It is as if you wanted to understand what a car is, and for all of us, understanding a car would mean – a large part of it would be understanding how the engine works that makes it go, but you can imagine someone saying ‘no’, ‘no’. The thing about cars is to understand why it is you get three-wheeled cars and four-wheeled cars, but you never get a five-wheeled car. And that is what we need to understand about cars. And that seems to me like Chomsky’s theory of language. He wanted to understand why certain syntactic constructions aren’t possible. And as far as I can see, he did everything he could to avoid the basic issue of how does language mean. And I think these large language models have put an end to that. Not in Chomsky’s mind, but in more or less everybody else’s mind.”