Strongly disagree. I've seen towering giants in their fields that still can develop a "mental block" if you will if their developed notions about how their technology/science should work doesn't pan out. E.g. why you often see scientific breakthroughs among younger scientists (and, yes, while I realize the "average age at Nobel breakthrough" has been rising over the past century, it still skews relatively quite young). For example, Brooks in particular spent his career around the idea that intelligence requires "real world interaction", so it's not surprising to see him pooh pooh the idea that something can become intelligent that lacks that experience.

I would be really interested in examples where Lecun, Brooks, Chomsky, or any others have argued their points in relation to some specific examples like the kinds that are pointed out in this article. Fully admit that I don't have a full catalog of their Twitter posts and interviews, so I genuinely would love to see this. I remain highly skeptical, though, when I only see them argue in generalities, e.g. "LLMs can't be smart because they don't have a model of explanations of how things occur." I mean, fine, but then how do they explain some of the quite frankly amazing capabilities of some of these systems if they're "just doing autocomplete." For example, saw an absolutely mind-blowing example where someone taught ChatGPT an entirely new made up language, and ChatGPT was able to guess at, for example, the appropriate declensions for different words. Would love to see Chomsky's reaction to that one.