Noam Chomsky: observation

Transcript context

…Now on the 1 hand people go into neuroscience because they want to understand the mind. They want that feeling where something clicks and you suddenly get how it works. That's what drew Chiromuta to the field in the first place. That's what keeps people up late at night reading papers. But on the other hand, there's just prediction. Building tools that work. If your model forecast data accurately, maybe you don't care whether it's true in some deeper sense. So LLMs are getting unreasonably good. They are winning math Olympiads. They are I mean, as of last week actually, GPT 5.2 apparently discovered a new theory. Well, it's it's solved 1 of these problems that Terence Tau had on on his website. This is insane. But does it actually understand anything? And does it matter if it does or doesn't, as long as it works? Chomsky had an amazing commentary on this a few years ago when we spoke and I think it's still as relevant today as it was then. Suppose that I submitted an article to a physics journal saying, I've got a fantastic new theory and accommodates all the laws of nature, the ones that are known, the ones that have yet to have been discovered. And it's such an elegant theory that I can say it in 2 words. Anything goes. Okay. That includes all the laws of nature, the ones we know, the ones we do not know yet, everything. What's the problem? The problem is they're not going to accept the paper because when you have a theory, there are 2 kinds of questions you have to ask. Why are things this way? Why are things not that way? If you don't get the second question, you've done nothing. GPT 3 has done nothing. Classic Chomsky. So maybe theories are overrated. Maybe prediction is enough. But Chiromuta worries about that trade off. Right? When you give up on understanding, you don't know when your tools will break. You're stuck with black boxes. They work until they don't and you won't see it coming when they don't. I spoke with philosopher Anna Chionika about this recently and she had a beautiful way of describing it.…

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