>Yes, and most with a background in linguistics or computer science have been saying the same since the inception of their disciplines
I'm not sure what authority linguists are supposed to have here. They have gotten approximately nowhere in the last 50 years. "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".
>Grammars are sets of rules on symbols and any form of encoding is very restrictive
But these rules can be arbitrarily complex. Hand-coded rules have a pretty severe complexity bounds. But LLMs show these are not in principle limitations. I'm not saying theory has nothing to add, but perhaps we should consider the track record when placing our bets.
I'm very confused by your comment, but appreciate that you have precisely made my point. There are no "bets" with regard to these topics. How do you think a computer works? Do you seriously believe LLMs somehow escape the limitations of the machines they run on?
Again: why can't any of that run on a sufficiently capable computer?
I can't help but perceive this as pseudo-profound bullshit. "Real soul and real imagination cannot run on a computer" is a canned "profound" statement with no substance to it whatsoever.
If a hunk of wet meat the size of a melon can do it, then why not a server rack full of nanofabricated silicon?
For the same reason you don't sit and talk with rocks. Nobody understands how it is that wet meat can do these things but rocks cannot. And a computer is a rock. As such, we have no idea whether all the hunks of wet meat in the world can figure out how to transform rocks into wet meat.
Modern computers can understand natural language, and can reply in natural language. This isn't even particularly new, we've had voice assistants for over a decade. LLMs are just far better at it.
Again: I see no reason why silicon plates can't do the same exact things a mush of wet meat does. And recent advances in AI sure suggest that they can.
I'm not sure what authority linguists are supposed to have here. They have gotten approximately nowhere in the last 50 years. "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".
>Grammars are sets of rules on symbols and any form of encoding is very restrictive
But these rules can be arbitrarily complex. Hand-coded rules have a pretty severe complexity bounds. But LLMs show these are not in principle limitations. I'm not saying theory has nothing to add, but perhaps we should consider the track record when placing our bets.