Generative A.I. doesn't much impress Noam Chomsky

But just how smart are these large language models? On the last day of the conference, I interviewed legendary linguist Noam Chomsky, now 93 years old, and Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor of cognitive science at New York University who has spent much of the past decade highlighting the limits of deep learning. Both were distinctly unimpressed with today's cutting edge A.I. Chomsky's big disappointment is that these large language models don't tell us anything at all about how the human brain works. Chomsky has devoted much of his life to advancing the theory that there is a universal grammar, or at least a set of structural concepts, that underpin all human languages, and that this grammar is somehow hard-wired into the brain. Chomsky thinks this explains why human infants can master language so easily--whereas today's computer systems need to be fed what Chomsky rightly calls "astronomical amounts of data" and even then still don't actually understand language at all.