Comment by cmiles74

Firstly, can't speak for Chomsky.

In this article he is very focused on science and works hard to delineate science (research? deriving new facts?) from engineering (clearly product oriented). In his opinion ChatGPT falls on the engineering side of this line: it's a product of engineering, OpenAI is concentrating on marketing. For sure there was much science involved but the thing we have access to is a product.

IMHO Chomsky is asking: while ChatGPT is a fascinating product, what is it teaching us about language? How is it advancing our knowledge of language? I think Chomsky is saying "not much."

Someone else mentioned embeddings and the relationship between words that they reveal. Indeed, this could be a worthy area of further research. You'd think it would be a real boon when comparing languages. Unfortunately the interviewer didn't ask Chomsky about this.