Comment by cmrdporcupine
2 years ago
"But I wish the authors expanded their position such that three quibbles were further debunked in the minds of those readers so that there's no such ambiguity or superficial loopholes in the authors' claims there."
Chomsky is writing an opinion article in the NYT, not a paper for an academic journal. I don't think there's room in this style for the kind of proofing that would be needed. And further, Chomsky spent his whole career expounding on his theories of linguistics and a philosophy of mind. The interested reader can look elsewhere.
He's writing an opinion piece which invites the reader to explore those topics, which could not fit into this style of article.
It undercuts the whole piece. The pronouncements feel question begging. Much of the article suggests someone who hasn't actually bothered to spend much time asking ChatGPT the questions he is so confident it can't answer well. He also doesn't seem aware that ChatGPT is a deliberately tamed model that is trying desperately to shy away from saying anything too controversial, and that was a choice made by openai, not something that highlights limitations with language models in general (or if it does, it's an entirely different, political question than technical question).
I accept that it's possible that he has some deep reasoning for the surface level arguments he's making that would make them less arbitrary seeming, but he hasn't even hinted at them in the article.