Dan and Tom, That article by Steven Piantadosi, which is dated Marh 2023, is obsolete. The author used a version of OpenAI, which was supposed to be based on GPT-4, but was actually based on features that were added to 8 copies of GPT 3.5, Each copy used the older version of GPT (LLMs by themselves) and added a front-end that did more complex reasoning with LLMs, such as creating stories, generating poetry, or drawing pictures.
The only thing that LLMs can do well is translate languages, natural of artificial, to and from one another. Even then, the LLMs cannot accommodate semantic differences. They do very well for Standard Average European (SAE), as Whorf called them. But they are much worse for languages whose semantics differ. For example, Polish and Russian are two Slavic languages with similar grammar. But the Polish religion is Roman Catholc, and the religious language is based on medieval Latin, as is SAE. But the Russian religion is based on Old Church Slavonic whose semantics is better preserved in Russian than in any SAE lnguage. As a result, Polish belongs to the SAE group.. Translations of Russian math and science texts to and from SAE languages are good. But translations of Russian literature to and from SAE are considerably worse. LLM-based translations of languages other than SAE are not so good, although texts about modern technology are usually quite good because the subject matter is defined in SAE languages. None of this supports Chomsky. If anything, it gives more support to Whorf, Jakobson, Peirce, Halliday, and others who put more emphasis on semantics than syntax. Following are the slides of a talk I presented that emphasizes Peirce and his diagrammatic foundations: https://jfsowa.com/talks/bionlp.pdf John
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