I am not a linguist but the deafening silence from Chomsky and his defenders really does demand being called out.
Syntactical models of language have been completely crushed by statistics-at-scale via neural nets. But linguists have not rejected the broken model.
The same thing happened with protein folding – researchers who spent the last 25 years building complex quantum mechanical/electrostatic models of protein structure suddenly saw AlphaFold completely crush prior methods. The difference is, bioinformatics researchers have already done a complete about-face and are taking the new AI tools and running with them.
I am not a linguist but the deafening silence from Chomsky and his defenders really does demand being called out.
Syntactical models of language have been completely crushed by statistics-at-scale via neural nets. But linguists have not rejected the broken model.
The same thing happened with protein folding – researchers who spent the last 25 years building complex quantum mechanical/electrostatic models of protein structure suddenly saw AlphaFold completely crush prior methods. The difference is, bioinformatics researchers have already done a complete about-face and are taking the new AI tools and running with them.