Research shows that the brain declines as we age. Yet Mr. Chomsky is still so sharp, lucid, and involved in deeply rigorous research and thought. Truly incredible!

Thank you for the interview. Noam Chomsky never ceased to amaze, with his breadth and depth of knowledge in a wide range of subjects. Even at 94, he still has all the energy to research and follow other super advanced research works, teach, give interviews, write and publish etc. I can barely understand his book on language, published decades ago... talking about difference in levels of intelligence, and he is always so humble.

Thank you Craig for this exceptional interview. I admire the level of respect you have for Prof Chomsky - one of the pillars in the modern age .

Noam always finds the heart of the matter and pins it down and embraces it. God bless him

The best thing you did is that you made him talk without any interruptions. Amazing questions

All hail and big Respect to Chomsky. Please live long, the human race needs your guidance

Can't thank professor Chomsky enough for his continuous contributions to science

Great interview, Chomsky is a constant inspiration.

It's always a treat to hear what Noam's brilliant mind has to say about a subject matter. Thank you both for the wonderful discussion.

I love seeing the Master teaching the grasshopper.

Thank you for this. I wish the world could think a little more clearly like Chomsky does. When he has gone we will miss him, indeed.

WOW. It was very interesting to hear Noam speak on the topic of AI and neural net research, a topic on which I've never heard him speak but one of several areas in which he has vast knowledge. I believe both Minsky and Chomsky were based at M.I.T. when Neural net research began. This interview/ interviewer was very good. Eye on AI really pressed Noam who is often quite opaque, for example, clarifying what he means by "impossible languages" and even clarifying that he doesn't believe in god.

Chomsky: We shouldn’t waste time on questions that are utterly meaningless. Smith: But I’m a journalist!

Thank you Craig and Dr. Chomsky for this very informative discussion.

Noam Chomsky, an American treasure .

Im just sitting down to watch this episode. What a plesant surprise, thanks Craig!

I'm delighted I'm still subscribed to this channel... Thanks. Noam is the real deal. Thank you ❤👍

i ppreciate the humility and the due respect of this colossus of intellect , felt truly appropriate , kudos to you

The poor guy! (Craig Smith.) But it was an excellent interview. I'm reading Einstein's "The Miracle Creed" right now. Thank you very much indeed.

The internal combustion engine was not just the technical and useful invention, it also has inspired Saadi Carnot to develop a new field of research -- Thermodynamics, which helps to understand why life is different from non-living things, having nothing to do with moving things by hot steam engines.

Very interesting to hear his thoughts on linguistics and cognition

With changes in the economy leading to instability in the stock market, some individuals may face a decrease in their investments in an effort to benefit from the current market conditions, I am considering liquidating my $725k portfolio consisting of bonds and stocks. Someone else in the same situation? Please tell me in the comments!..

Fascinating discussion, thank you very much!!!

Enough said: "I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today-and even professional scientists-seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is-in my opinion-the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth. (Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944, EA 61-574)"

Thank you both, Sirs. I appreciated the talk very much.

So wonderful a discussion of AI and science. Noam Chomsky is a great scientist and compassionate person. His political views reflect these qualities too. I wish I could have been a student of this great man.

This was magnificent, an absolute pleasure to listen through and help steer more my comprehension of these topics and subtopics.

Who said LLMs "explain" or "teach" anything????!!!!! A calculator doesn´t explain or teach aritmentics, it just DOES aritmetic operations in a hugely more efficient way than we do. The way our brains truly work remains a vital theme in itself. But technology doesn´t need it solved anymore, to obtain human and very soon "superhuman" level results on pretty much any possible realm of endeavor.

It will be a dark day in human history when Professor Chomsky passes on. He is the last commanding voice standing against the rabid irrationalities of modern "AI" research. AI is no more than a misnomer in our times.

I want to believe that prof chmosky is in an endless recursive thought process when it comes to defining what thinking is.

This is a wonderful interview

Great respect for Norm Chomsky; unfortunately, he may be wrong about the perceived threat of AI to humans - it is likely greater than we know already. For a group of AI specialists to already be speaking openly about the threat AI poses to humanity, suggests advancements in the field have progressed much faster than anticipated. Like global climactic change, the reality of AI eclipsing human intelligence is a reality, and something we should all take seriously.

I'd say that a mathematically inclined savant would be far superior to an AI in terms of both speed an accuracy, and the difference would be increased by orders of magnitude when standardised for energy usage per calculation. In other words, Chomsky is correct in stating that we have greater computational capacity than do neural nets. Most of us simply don't tap into our capacity, with savants being a striking exception.

Much appreciated.

22:00 but isn't that what the transformer model (attention is all you need) basically does? basically evaluating the relevance each token has to every other token and therefore understanding the structure?

7T fmri can resolve very small regions of the brain cortex and have been used to read words with the help of large language models and images from the cortex can be recontructed using latent diffusion.

Conclusion, we live in a complex world where everything becomes complicated to explain in very simple and consise way ! A I = A R = C 8 = GP .

Looking at the construct of the human brain to understand intelligence is similar to looking at the construct of the human eye to understand the physics of light. All that biology is doing, is capturing, with its limited biological means, a limited portion of a physical phenomenon. If Isaac Newton would have depended on biology, there will no zoom lenses or telescopes for that matter.

thank you mr craig i will subscribe to your channel, it was an awe inspiring interview

Best unintentional ASMR ever...

"Chomsky is 94, and he was sitting with a clock positioned ominously over his head" what a bizarrely threatening way to introduce a guest, lol

Good verbal skills

I think Noam is saying we don’t need to make living things to do what living things can do

We should expect that our brain is related to the environment we live in ( e.i. we have arms, legs, eyes, ears , ....etc) and it seems strange to try to build an inteligens in a box. On the other hand if our goal is to create something more inteligent than we are then even being inspired by our brain may also be a bad idea.

I asked the example "The friends of my brothers are in England" to Chatgpt and it gave correct answer

👏👏👏👏

wow noam chomsky! thanks for making this available. when was this recorded?

Nonetheless, I love listening to his lucidity and spirit.

A robust pure engineering discipline can absolutely drive all kinds of advancements in scientific understanding. Even as to neural networks and human cognition, even if neural networks are not foundational to human intelligence or ratiocination, they are clearly and provably involved in cognitive processes, and it is proper to try to understand what those limits are. Understanding how neural networks work is excellent for understanding their limitations; building neural networks is a great way to prove that it isn't all that's going on in the brain. If you don't think we've learned an enormous amount more about how an Eagle flies from engineering all kinds of flying machines, you just have no clue at all about the field of biomechanics and how it has developed. Most of the basic terms in the study of bird flight originated in aeronautical engineering and all of the most important phenomena were first discovered and quantified to advance aeronautical engineering.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! I'm working on a knowledge base concept design and his thought process and logic was so helpful. Now I feel great about my approach.

I wonder what Dr. Chomsky would have to say about how scientists just created the first complete map of an insect brain.

Noam at this point in the 21st Century for a lot of society, common sense is superior intelligence. Thank you for yours.

Then. Chomsky said that LLModels are awesome and useful and can be harmful in a way. His critiques are about the contributions of neural networks in language acquisition. I think he said that creating a thinking machine doesn't make us understand how people think, how we acquire language (of course). He places engineering tasks in an intellectually inferior category, even if they achieve amazing results. think I misunderstood his definition of intelligence. I don't want biological intelligence, or understanding why or what it is. I want to cure disease and reduce human suffering, make life easier like LLM did for him with instant captions. Perhaps AI can help a lot with this.

Does A.I. have emotions? How do emotions translate into doing good or doing harm? Do emotionless things resolve self-preservation as the logical reason to eliminate a threat to their existence?

Thanks again to Noam Chomsky for his patience to total ignorance 👏👏👏👏👏👏

Coherent and enlightened! Would anyone please explain the meaning of word "dysfunctional" in the context of the following sentences that Chomsky said: "It's possible now to formulate a plausible thesis that language is a natural object like others, which involved in such ways to have perfect design, but to be highly dysfunctional, because that's true of natural objects. Generally, it's part of the nature of evolution, which doesn't take into account possible functions."

Great discussion, I hope you can get Noam on again and talk about MIT's VISTA simulator with their self driving car that uses about 19 neuron-like elements and was modelled after a worm that has about 300 neurons, using Reinforcement Learning (RL). The MIT system uses a three dimensional street image simulator to train the car to drive, and then that learning model is transferred to the actual car, and it has been demonstrated to work in field tests. The original RL work by Barto and Sutton in their paper, and 1st and 2nd edition of their RL book is a great source on this topic, along with the key reference Barto and Sutton use in their RL books, and that is Klopf, who wrote the book "The Hedonistic Neuron" (under a US Air Force contract). It is very hard to find this book, as it is not even available on Amazon, a friend of mine in Cambodia was able to find one on EBay for me. A. Harry Klopf had a similar tragic end (via suicide) that Turing did, I suspect they had similar, though uniquely different, challenges dealing with "society" and being very different individuals than most people. I think being uniquely intelligent was extremely hard for them.

Thank you Dr. Chomsky for your responses. I appreciate that! Please consider that engineering can help a lot to understand the brain and mind, in many ways.

Interesting 🤔🤔🤔

Did anyone understand what he meant at 20:00? I don’t think I understand his examples; The friends of my brothers are in England I tested it with got 4 and it seemed to have understood it refers to friends So what is he, Chomsky, proves or points the limitation of llm of what exactly?

Imagine your entire life's work being nullified when Mr Chomsky says 'asking that question is irrelevant it's like asking if submarines swim'! 💀

Kasparov in 1997: AI will be able to beat the world chess champion maybe in 10 years, but most likely never.

Noam Chomsky, I wish you were 80 years younger, to try your ideas with now and future tools. Those "young people" need to try much harder problems, for much longer. Decades, not minutes or hours. And ones where billions of lives are on the line, not just words. Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

I wonder how the fan boys of AI machine mongers would respond to his arguments and doubts. Seems like most AI people may be confusing mind with the physical brain circuits by labeling the mind properties as metaphysical or be even completely off track when it comes to solving the being-a-human problems.

One can make the same arguement made by Chomsky about any science. A lot of progress have been made in Physics with many spectacular applications along the way based on laws and mathematical rules or discriptions discovered in Physics, but we really understand the true nature of the physical world? Do we really understand what gravity really is? Physics is valid science because of the laws, mathematical rules, and applications made possible. As mathematics, which can largely be seen as a human creation, has proven futile in describing the human cognition, a different approach to capturing the model of human cognition is needed. Come in LLMs based on the connectionist approach (the alternate mentalist approach seems invalid and dead) to describe human cognition, which can be seen as progress to simulate human cognition with powerful applications. What is the difference between this picture and science in the traditional sense?

Chomsky's apparently erroneous critique of Transformer-based LLMs is actually correct in the larger sense. His apparent error? Ask ChatGPT the following: "What is the grammar diagram for the sentence: The friends of my brothers are in England." It will produce the correct _structure_ and, indeed, if asked "Who is in England, my brother or their friends?" It will answer correctly. The larger sense in which Chomsky is correct is given in the paper "Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy". See, in particular, Figure 1, which classifies Transformers as at the bottom rung in the Chomsky Hierarchy of grammars. The reason for this classification is similar to the reason that diagram places RNNs just above Transformers despite the fact that topologically speaking, they are capable of emulating a universal Turing machine (which is at or next to the top grammar, depending on how strict one wants to be): The pragmatic limits on gradient descent training algorithms combined with that of attempting to represent a UTM's writable store in RNN form. Transformers can, within the context length they provide, learn grammars with recursion depth to some extent (much shorter than their context length) -- but aside from the limited recursion per sentence, there is also the fact that that number of parameters goes up as the square of the context length, which makes total document comprehension subject to limits that natural language understanding is not. This distinction becomes crucial when the field of AI ethics refuses to address the IS vs OUGHT distinction head-on and, instead, comes up with all manner of unprincipled "metrics" that they use to "quantify" properties of LLMs such as "bias" or "safety" or "toxicity" or "hallucination" or... the list goes on and on. By conflating IS with OUGHT they commit the first and most egregious transgression against ethics and they even do so in the name of "ethics". AIs that cannot comprehend the cognitive _structure_ of the _entire_ corpus on which they are trained, cannot critically examine the utterances contained therein for self-consistency. That means they are incapable of _constructing_ truth even as defined _relative_ to the corpus as the universe of observations being modeled. I once pointed Chomsky to his colleague, Marvin Minsky's final plea to the field of AI, that they take seriously Algorithmic Information Theory's power in discerning truth. Minsky was so forceful in his admonition that he recommended everyone spend the rest of their lives studying it. Chomsky's response? People should take Minsky's advice.

Hey AI, can you create a Turing machine? AI: "It is theoretically possible for me to create a program that simulates the function of a Turing Machine, but it would likely be very complex and difficult to understand. Additionally, there are many limitations when working with text-based systems like myself, such as limited memory capacity and speed constraints. While it's possible I could design something that works, it might not perform well compared to dedicated hardware or software implementations designed specifically for this purpose."

Why is the clock ominous?

-- Is it impossible to extend/change an LLM model to include non-linear orderings as well while training? If so, why? -- A plane maker may ask what is the hydrodynamic (scientific) principle by which a thing heavier than air may float-and-move in the air (or, ''fly''), whether an artificial plane or an eagle. -- Perhaps what Pro. Chomsky is insisting is that human intelligence is q u a l i t a t i v e l y different (or works qualitatively differently) from artificial intelligence of the present LLM kind.

Except Max has been publicly vocal about a sizable risk of an existential take over by a AGI, not current GAI.

They called the police on all the self driving cars who got together and were engaged in an illegal horn blowing party, at an ungodly hour.

47:14 Okay, going to have to stop it right there, cause I think this where I came in, where he was liking his captions cause he’s hard of hearing. No, but joking aside, hasn’t engineering led science to crucial questions before? I am thinking of how basic principles of thermodynamics were at stake in exploring the limits and parameters of steam engines. The AIs are deceit engines. They will naturally be exploring our mind’s vulnerabilities to deceit. These vulnerabilities just might instruct us about “properties of the phenotype”. In a sense, they will be undertaking the “invasive” strategies of inquiry that Chomsky notes are beyond the pale. We may learn something at enormous cost. As for Chomsky, it warps my mind that he still can so effortlessly warp my mind. And I’m stealing “But these are vacuous questions…”

anybody know why he doesn't just say context instead of structure?

Imagine being so dumb that you make Chomsky angry lol. From asking three times the same question, to the adulation of Musk's silly endeavor, to asking about God 😂😂😂 Chomsky as always slaps ❤

I can not decide my mind

Rather than saying that GPT is AI, the situation where the entire society is covered by GPT and data science is that human beings are becoming one AI on a global scale. Human civilization is about to become a single AI. Is that okay? I think that's fine. Because even if human civilization becomes just a single AI with no individuality, I will continue to exhibit individuality as myself. It's just that my personality won't be passed down as civilization or culture after my death. It's a shame though. But, after all, I love the world where my sensibilities and works come in contact with someone else's sensibilities beyond my death, for example, a thousand years, from the bottom of my heart. AI may surpass death. But it wouldn't go beyond the miracle of human sensitivity surpassing death. Let us advance artificial intelligence research into the realm of art by enhancing AI to the point of miracles. I love human and AI.

Chomsky complexity in explanation is inversely proportional to its application and has become redundant.

23 year old: I'm tiiiiired. I wasted my life.

nice glasses - must be an intellectual

GPT has contributed to advancements in sorting algorithms. That's not nothing

this is a guy who doesn't think national debts are a threat to the ppl in all nation states

आप वैज्ञानिक प्रश्नों को वोटों से हल नहीं कर सकते लेकिन आप नए उत्तरों का चक्र अन्वेषित कर सकते हैं। You can't solve the scientific questions by votes but you can invent the wheel for new answers. -Amit Misra

Choamsky may be correct in as much as neural nets are not a model of human cognition but I believe that would be an unnecessary endeavor. If mankind had been fixated on recreating the way a bird flies and refusing to use fixed wing aircraft because it did not accurately recreate the way the birds did it I am doubtful if we would have human flight today. I say his comments although correct are irrelevant to the endeavors that ai scientists are trying to achieve and also irrelevant to the dangers and potential good of the technology.

Mmm

The real horror about AI is not if it can be more intelligent than humans - it is that it is regarded intelligence at all. How can any intelligent human being disregard consciousness, the subconscious, daydreams, experience of art, of emotions, of empathy and nocturnal dreams?

Can Machines Think? "I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.” “Nevertheless, I believe that at the end of the century, the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” -Alan Turing (1950) The Imitation Game

you know who i am going to listen to about drug development in 2023. noam chomsky. lol

Noam, mate, read my papers on the Social Trackways Theory and the Evolution of Human Cognition, and then on the Evolution of Language PLEASE! In (2014), (2017), in ' the journal Biological Theory by me 'Kim Shaw-Williams'. We got our symbolically aware and autobiographical or 'sentient' narrative minds from recognizing and then incrementally gaining the capacity to read/understand the STORIES told by our own and our mother's trackways trackways, then those of other band members , then of all terrestrial animals.... all hunter and gatherer human children can recognize their mother's trackways by the age of 4!!! The trails of footprint signs of trackways have only been read or noticed by us humans !!!!! It is a UNIQUE COGNITIVE NICHE!!!. It started to evolve incrementally because we became OBLIGATE BIPEDS at 6Ma....all other animals use smell, when they cannot find agents of interest using eyesight and hearing! FFS, Graham Hewes first spoke of the idea in the 1960's PLEASE!!!!

Chomsky should experiment with hearing aids instead of or in addition to closed captions to ascertain whether hearing his own voice properly results in speech that is less of a monotone. Not to mention the closed caption AI has holes right through it and the great majority of verbal communication occurs outside of the limited communicative capacity of the words alone.

Gnome instead of Noam😂

Is Bugs Bunny a narcissist?

By his own admission he doesnt actually know what this alternate computation is or understand how it produces our thoughts. Therefore he cant say that our thought process is not based on similar structure and processes. For all we know right now is that all humans do is predict the next image or sound etc from our various senses. If we could feed into our neural nets the colossal amount if data a child gets by its 18th birthday then Id guess itd be pretty near to human capabilities. Yes biological thought is definitely different to artificial thought BUT there is nothing to say it doesnt manifest same or similar processes especially at scale.

Please don't compare AI with human mind or human brain,the both are quiet diffetent things，just as a parrot speaks english and a human speaks english are quit different things(the both are 'SEEMS LIKE') 🎉

Interesting that Noam doesn’t recognize any other model for consciousness than John Locke. I don’t believe shutting down the substantive topic that extends beyond materialism is a useful position.

Spooff .....

noam keeps going back to the eagle vs airplane example is annoying...theyre both flying. When the hosts asks about intelligence thats what hes refering to. Noam is old and thinks he is so wise

this is incorrect 😂

This AI is ……..

Soundless video

Is it true that noam associated with jeffery epstein...if so it shows very, very bad judgement