Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning
The gist
Google researcher Peter Norvig's 2011 essay answering Noam Chomsky's critique of statistical machine learning was reposted to Hacker News.
The old dispute over whether statistical models count as science is being replayed in the LLM era.
How it unfolded
- 2011At the Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium during MIT's 150th birthday, Chomsky derided machine-learning researchers who use purely statistical methods to mimic behavior without understanding its meaning.
- 2011Chomsky's remarks came in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods.
- 2011Norvig published his essay "On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning" as a response to Pinker and Chomsky.
Key terms
- statistical machine learning
- A machine-learning approach that builds predictive functions from data using statistics and functional analysis.
- LLM
- A machine learning model trained on huge amounts of text to generate, summarize, translate, and analyze language.
- Hacker News
- A social news website focused on computer science and entrepreneurship, run by Y Combinator.
Source: Wikipedia