Comment by RosanaAnaDana

This is what I've been repeating for months/ years. Chomsky had some interesting theories, that for a while, were very worth discussing as frameworks for the emergence of language.

Now we have chatGPT, a very very interesting framework for the discussion of emergence and language. And even more dramatically, it is in some sense empirical. We haven't yet even begun to explore it, but this imo is the allegorical to the discovery of DNA in the context of the theory of evolution.

Before Watson and Crick and Franklin, we had a coherent theory of evolution (ish). We knew all about selective breeding and it was pretty clear that descent and the transmittance of information 'happened'. Mendelian genetics was enough for that. But as useful as a teaching tool like Mendelian genetics is, the entire world changed with the discovery of the actual-particle responsible for that information. The world changed with the discovery of DNA. I don't know the zeitgeist of other competing theories for how that information was transmitted. But what we do know now, is that they were all wrong, to the extent that they don't get mentioned or discussed.

A real interesting discovery extending from ChatGPT is the apparent emergency of language from what amounts to large piles of information and sufficient complexity. It appears that Chomsky may just be entirely wrong.