alt Hacker NewsHere's Chomsky quoted in the article, from 1969:
> But it must be recognized that the notion of "probability of a sentence" is an entirely useless one, under any known interpretation of this term.
He was impressively early to the concept, but I think even those skeptical of the ultimate value of LLMs must agree that his position has aged terribly. That seems to have been a fundamental theoretical failing rather than the computational limits of the time, if he couldn't imagine any framework in which a novel sentence had probability other than zero.
I guess that position hasn't aged worse than his judgment of the Khmer Rouge (or Hugo Chavez, or Epstein, or ...) though. There's a cult of personality around Chomsky that's in no way justified by any scientific, political, or other achievements that I can see.
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> novel sentence
The question then becomes on of actual novelty versus the learned joint probabilities of internalised sentences/phrases/etc.
Generation or regurgitation? Is there a difference to begin with..?
He did say 'any known' back in the year 1969 though, so judging it to today's knowns would still not be a justification to the idea's age.
wasn't his grammar classification revolutionary at the time ? it seems it influenced parsing theory later on
I agree that Chomsky's influence, especially in this century, has done more harm than good.
There's no point minimizing his intelligence and achievements, though.
His linguistics work (eg: grammars) is still relevant in computer science, and his cynical view of the West has merit in moderation.