[evantbyrne]

I agree it's neat on a technical level. However, as I'm sure the people making these models are well-aware, this is a pretty significant design limitation for matters where correctness is not a matter of opinion. Do you foresee the pendulum swinging back in the other direction once again to address correctness issues?

[int_19h]

There is a very long-running joke in AI, going back to 1970s (or maybe even earlier?) that goes something like, "quality of results is inversely proportional to the number of linguists working on the project".

It seems that every time we try it, we find out that when model picks up the language structure on its own, it ends up being better at it than if we try to use our own understanding of language as a basis. Which does seem to imply that our own understanding is still rather limited and is not a very accurate model.

On the other hand, the fact that models get amazing translation capabilities just from training on different languages (seriously, if you are doing any kind of automated translation, do yourself a favor and try GPT-4) implies that there is a "there" there and the Universal Grammar people are probably correct. We just haven't figured out the specifics. Perhaps we will by doing "brain surgery" on those models, eventually.

[famouswaffles]

The "other direction" was abandoned because it doesn't work well. Grammar isn't how language works, it's just useful fiction. There's plenty of language modelling in the weights of the trained model and that's much more robust than anything humans could cook up.

[evantbyrne]

> Me: Be developer reading software documentation.

> itdoesntwork.jpg

Grammar isn't how language works, it's just useful fiction.