[Mathnerd314]

There was some linguist (Deb Roy?) who videotaped his children growing up. One of his observations was that every learned syllable etc. was tied to observing it as a stimulus and trying to imitate it. Now it is true, children are pretty good learners, they can often learn something the first time they see it, but actually I have seen some LLM stuff about "instant learning" - e.g. the training is only done with one pass over the material. https://www.fast.ai/posts/2023-09-04-learning-jumps/

[qntty]

This is an interesting connection. If I had to guess, the Chomskyist response would be to say, yes but this only applies to LLMs that have been pre-trained already (i.e. have structures in place needed to understand language in general). I think a Chomskyist would say that language learning is precisely like fine-tuning and not the pre-training of foundation models.