The title ChatGPT raises questions about how humans acquire language and whether machine learning can provide an answer. The recent release of Chat -4 has reignited the debate around the theories of Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most renowned linguists. Professor Chomsky has long suggested that language is distinct in humans, with a particular grammar and deep structure, and that children can learn their native language despite the “poverty of the stimulus” that they are exposed to.
Artificial Intelligence has advanced considerably since the 1997 moment when Deep Blue, a chess computer, defeated Garry Kasparov, the world champion. Large language models, of which the most famous is Chat, produce output that resembles human conversations. This has prompted academics to examine Chomskyan language theories, particularly the ideas of “Merge” and the underlying hierarchical structures that define human language in comparison to other forms of communication such as computer code or whale song.
Researchers have used probing tests to evaluate the extent to which Chat “knows” language and how it deals with novel words. They discovered that Chat can learn the grammar and manipulate phrases by folding the sentence structure which is similar to the way children learn language. With the Chomsky “poverty of the stimulus” argument in mind, a group of Linguists conducted an experiment that revealed that Chat can learn language with the same amount of texts as a child has been exposed to. Though Noam Chomsky himself has given only a brusque riposte to these tests, the findings of the experiments are challenging his theories about the importance of innate language for humans’ ability to learn a language.
Chat is developed by OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research laboratory that focuses on developing safe artificial general intelligence (AGI). The laboratory was founded in 2015 in San Francisco and is now a subsidiary of Microsoft. Apart from Chat, OpenAI has launched several other language models for natural language processing tasks. Noam Chomsky is considered the father of linguistics. He is an American linguist, cognitive scientist, historian, philosopher, and political critic and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work has greatly influenced the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy.
