Now this is interesting! I've always been very dubious about Chomsky's innateness theories; does #ChatGPT show anything interesting about whether particular innate structures are, or more likely are not, actually needed to learn human language?
Even if they aren't needed, there could still be a claim that humans do have them and it shows in the way we learn language, which one could argue is different than the way an LLM does; but this is still an interesting start.
@ceoln So, finally, a problem with Chomsky’s innateness idea is: what’s the innate bit? Chomsky has paired it down to something he calls “merge”, which I understand to be akin to recursion, or perhaps analogous to a stack. Everett (the guy interviewed by the Tehran Times article you cited) has studied an Amazon tribe whose language, he thinks, doesn’t display evidence of “merge”. Everett is the only person who has spent substantial time with these people, so to argue with him about this strikes me as going out on a limb.
(Sorry to be all “reply guy”. Hope this was interesting.)
