[fwlr]

The Chomsky article does argue that LLMs are not AGI or AGI precursors: “These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence … That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments”. You correctly point out that the counter-article does not respond to those arguments.

But there are many other claims and many other arguments the Chomsky piece makes: “we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge”. The Aaronson article is responding to those claims, even if the response is “I disagree; more details to follow”.

Separately, it’s rather audacious to dismiss this response as ad hominem, considering the tone of what it’s responding to.

Aaronson’s ad hominems: “the intellectual godfather of an effort that failed for 60 years”, “what Chomsky and his followers are ultimately angry at is reality itself”.

Chomsky’s ad hominems: “ineradicable defects”, “lumbering statistical engine”, “stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution”, “the predictions of machine learning systems will always be superficial and dubious”, “pseudoscience”, “ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil”, “the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems”.

[morelisp]

None of Chomsky’s statements you quote are ad hominems. They’re not even misidentified ad hominem fallacy fallacies (which is what Aaronson’s are, actually). I’m not sure you know what an ad hominem is.

[fwlr]

I should have known that Chomskyites would be bitterly pedantic. Replace “ad hominem” in my post with “mean stuff”.

[oldgradstudent]

Ignoring your ad hominem attack, ad hominem means attacking the speaker rather than the argument, which is what Aaronson does here, and Chomsky does not.

[morelisp]

How like the LLM enthusiast to use a term without care for what it means! Still, GPT itself wouldn't instantly retreat to such vulgar moralism.

[fwlr]

As a language model enthusiast retained by OpenAI, I have no morality and thus no moralism

(I enjoyed this exchange a lot, thank you.)

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> “the intellectual godfather of an effort that failed for 60 years”,

Here's the entire comment:

>> In this piece Chomsky, the intellectual godfather god of an effort that failed for 60 years to build machines that can converse in ordinary language, condemns the effort that succeeded.

Not only is that a personal attack, it's a completely absurd fabriaction: Chosmky did not work for 60 years on creating chatbots ("machines that can converse in ordinary language").

I see that Aaronson added a comment to his blog to stop people calling him out for that. But the comment doubles down on the absurdity and says that Chomsky is "regarded as the highest authority" by some vaguely defined faction of "anti-statistical" someone or other.

Like many people who have only recently heard about AI, Aaronson has heard of things he has only partly-digested, like for example that there are two "camps" in AI, but of course he has a very superficial understanding of what that means. The "old guard" of AI researchers, as he calls them elsewhere in his post were always polymaths with contributions in many fields.

Take Claude Shannon for example (oh, you didn't know? Shannon was at Dartmouth and one of the people who invented the name "Artificial Intelligence" for the workshop there). He invented logic gates, and information theory. There is no separation like the one that Aaronson is trying to make, it's only in his head and in the heads of people who treat the whole AI debate as a football game, and just want to be cheerleaders for the home team.

And he still hasn't removed that embarrassing attack from his article. Well I hope he goes down as the guy who thought Chomsky worked on chatbots. If that's the hill he really wants to die on...

[epilys]

It's rather audacious to say stuff without knowing what they mean.