I was in the audience during the panel and Chomsky was really trying to hold onto a view of science disconnected from the engineering needed to replicate the natural phenomenon. To take a simple example:
Suppose you’re the Wright Brothers and you built a flying machine.
Chomsky’s response would be: But you didn’t explain how birds fly.
On the one hand, sure. Birds fly differently. On the other, the machine flies. Why does it need to explain all of flight?
The same is true of language models. They don’t explain how we acquire language. But they replicate language uses in ways that look like language speakers.
Suppose you’re the Wright Brothers and you built a flying machine.
Chomsky’s response would be: But you didn’t explain how birds fly.
On the one hand, sure. Birds fly differently. On the other, the machine flies. Why does it need to explain all of flight?
The same is true of language models. They don’t explain how we acquire language. But they replicate language uses in ways that look like language speakers.