[glomgril]

He is coming from the perspective of a long-running debate on symbolic versus statistical/data-driven approaches to modeling language structure and use. It seems in recent years he has had trouble coming to terms with the fact that at least for real-world applications of language technology, the statistical approach has simply won the war (or at worst, forms the core foundation on top of which symbolic approaches can have some utility).

I come from the same academic tradition, and have colleagues in common with him. He has been advocating for a quasi-chomskyan perspective on language science for many years -- as have many others working at the intersection of linguistics and psychology/cog sci.

TBH I suspect he himself is a large part of his target audience. A lot of older school academics raised in the symbolic tradition are pretty unsettled by the incredible achievements of the data-driven approach.

Personally I saw the writing on the wall years ago and have transitioned to working in statistical NLP (or "AI" I suppose). Feeling pretty good about that decision these days.

FWIW I do think symbolic approaches will start to shine in the next several years, as a way to control the behavior of modern statistical LMs. But doubtful they will ever produce anything comparable to current systems without a strong base model trained on troves of data.

edit: Worth noting that Marcus has produced plenty of high-quality research in his career. I think his main problem here is that he seems to believe that AI systems should function analogously to how human language/cognition functions. But from an engineering/product perspective, how a system works is just not that important compared to how well it works. There's probably a performance ceiling for purely statistical models, and it seems likely that some form of symbolic machinery can raise that ceiling a bit. Techniques that work will eventually make their way into products, no matter which intellectual tradition they come from. But framing things in this way is just not his style.