Comment by godelski

  > The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists. 

I think they are really excited by this. There seems no deficiency of linguists using these machines.

But I think it is important to distinguish the ability to understand language and translate it. Enough that you yourself put quotes around "understanding". This can often be a challenge for many translators, not knowing how to properly translate something because of underlying context.

Our communication runs far deeper than the words we speak or write on a page. This is much of what linguistics is about, this depth. (Or at least that's what they've told me, since I'm not a linguist) This seems to be the distinction Chomsky is trying to make.

  > The main debate now is over the semantics of words like "understanding" and whether or not an LLM is conscious in the same way as a human being (it isn't).

Exactly. Here, I'm on the side of Chomsky and I don't think there's much of a debate to be had. We have a long history of being able to make accurate predictions while erroneously understanding the underlying causal nature.

My background is physics, and I moved into CS (degrees in both), working on ML. I see my peers at the top like Hinton[0] and Sutskever[1] making absurd claims. I call them absurd, because it is a mistake we've made over and over in the field of physics[2,3]. One of those lessons you learn again and again, because it is so easy to make the mistake. Hinton and Sutskever say that this is a feature, not a bug. Yet we know it is not enough to fit the data. Fitting the data allows you to make accurate, testable predictions. But it is not enough to model the underlying causal structure. Science has a long history demonstrating accurate predictions with incorrect models. Not just in the way of the Relativity of Wrong[4], but more directly. Did we forget that the Geocentric Model could still be used to make good predictions? Copernicus did not just face resistance from religious authorities, but also academics. The same is true for Galileo, Boltzmann, Einstein and many more. People didn't reject their claims because they were unreasonable. They rejected the claims because there were good reasons to. Just... not enough to make them right.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dhlvzh/geoffr...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1o0TQzry8&t=449s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM

[3] Think about what Fermi said in order to understand the relevance of this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

[4] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html