Noam Chomsky

Suppose that I submitted an article to a physics journal saying, I've got a fantastic new theory and accommodates all the laws of nature, the ones that are known, the ones that have yet to have been discovered.

And it's such an elegant theory that I can say it in two words.

Anything goes.

Okay.

That includes all the laws of nature.

The ones we know.

The ones we do not know yet.

Everything.

What's the problem?

The problem is they're not going to accept the paper because when you have a theory, there are two kinds of questions you have to ask.

Why are things this way?

Why are things not that way?

If you don't get the second question, you've done nothing.

GPT-3 has done nothing.

If we are organic creatures, we're going to be like other organic creatures in that there are bounds to our cognitive capacities.

So for example, a rat can be trained to run pretty complicated nazes, but it can't be trained to learn a prime number maze.

Turn right at every prime number, it just doesn't have the concept.

And no matter how much training you do, you're not going to get anywhere.

Well, I suspect there's reasons to suppose we're like rats.

We have capacities.