[leobg]

I had always had wanted to ask him if he didn’t think now that his critique of BF Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” had been wrong after all, and that LLMs are the experimental proof of Skinner’s idea that simple conditioning can give rise to something that, to us, looks like intelligence.

Now I’ll never know.

(But maybe the two of them can have a discussion now in the afterlife, now that their worldly egos and public opinion are out of the way.)

[leto_ii]

He has discussed this in recent interviews and talks e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

> his critique of BF Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” had been wrong after all

btw, this is in no way proven (or true imo).

[foldr]

I'd be fairly cautious in assuming that these more recent coauthored pieces by Chomsky represent his views very accurately. They're pretty crude by his standards and don't really read like his writing (though he may well have signed off on them in some sense).

[leto_ii]

Many interviews with him directly you can check out. Article is consistent with those interviews.

[foldr]

There is some overlap with the content of recent interviews, but only some. In particular, the fussing over what is or isn’t “true intelligence” comes from Watumull and isn’t consistent with Chomsky’s past comments on AI over several decades.

[leobg]

Skinner isn’t mentioned in the article.