Comment by theptip
19 hours ago
A newborn brain is not a blank slate, it comes with a very rich prior (as Chomsky himself would argue), for example the ability to rapidly acquire language, control a body, etc.
An LLM must construct all of its grammatical structure, world models, etc. from scratch during pretraining.
LLM pre-training is more like recapitulating evolution of the mammalian brain than childhood development.
Of course children are not a blank state. My point is to argue that LLMs are not an argument against UG.