The False Promise of Chomskyism

I was asked to respond to the New York Times opinion piece entitled The False Promise of ChatGPT, by Noam Chomsky along with Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull (who once took my class at MIT). I’ll be busy all day at the Harvard CS department, where I’m giving a quantum talk this afternoon, but for now:

In this piece Chomsky, the intellectual godfather of an effort that failed for 60 years to build machines that can converse in ordinary language, condemns the effort that succeeded. He condemns ChatGPT for four reasons:

1. because it could, in principle, misinterpret sentences that could also be sentence fragments, like “John is too stubborn to talk to” (bizarrely, he never checks whether it does misinterpret it—I just tried it this morning and it seems to decide correctly based on context whether it’s a sentence or a sentence fragment, much like I would!);
2. because it doesn’t learn the way humans do (personally, I think ChatGPT and other large language models have massively illuminated at least one component of the human language faculty, what you could call its predictive coding component, though clearly not all of it);
3. because it could learn false facts or grammatical systems if fed false training data (how could it be otherwise?); and
4. most of all because it’s “amoral,” refusing to take a stand on potentially controversial issues (he gives an example involving the ethics of terraforming Mars).

This last, of course, is a choice, imposed by OpenAI using reinforcement learning. The reason for it is simply that ChatGPT is a consumer product. The same people who condemn it for not taking controversial stands would condemn it much more loudly if it did — just like the same people who condemn it for wrong answers and explanations, would condemn it equally for right ones (Chomsky promises as much in the essay).

I submit that, like the Jesuit astronomers declining to look through Galileo’s telescope, what Chomsky and his followers are ultimately angry at is reality itself, for having the temerity to offer something up that they didn’t predict and that doesn’t fit their worldview.

[Note for people who might be visiting this blog for the first time: I’m a CS professor at UT Austin, on leave for one year to work at OpenAI on the theoretical foundations of AI safety. I accepted OpenAI’s offer in part because I already held the views here, or something close to them; and given that I could see how large language models were poised to change the world for good and ill, I wanted to be part of the effort to help prevent their misuse. No one at OpenAI asked me to write this or saw it beforehand, and I don’t even know to what extent they agree with it.]