Geoffrey Hinton called Noam Chomsky's theory 'stupid' as the AI debate echoes the behaviorist-cognitive science split. The opinion piece argues LLMs are based on a discredited psychology.
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Geoffrey Hinton, the figure known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, has called Noam Chomsky's theory of language "stupid." The remark came in response to Chomsky's critique of the large language model approach behind ChatGPT, which Chomsky argued in a March 2023 essay is based on a flawed understanding of intelligence. The exchange highlighted a deeper divide between two schools of thought: behaviorism, which Hinton's deep learning approach implicitly relies on, and the cognitive science tradition that Chomsky helped establish, according to a recent opinion piece.
Behaviorism, long discredited in psychology, treated the mind as a black box and focused on stimulus-response-reinforcement. Chomsky's 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" dismantled that framework, showing it could not explain humans' ability to generate novel sentences or understand counterfactuals. The modern AI industry, through reinforcement learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, has effectively resurrected the behaviorist principle, the opinion piece argued.
The opinion piece drew parallels between the harm caused by behaviorism in psychology and education and the potential harm of the current AI hype. The author wrote that the dominance of this false notion of intelligence diverts resources toward a path known to be wrong.
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