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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by lostmsu on Friday November 06, 2026 @10:27AM (#50393500)
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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by rcxdude on Friday November 06, 2026 @11:13AM (#50394269)
If you are counting by bytes and including all sensory input, sure. In terms of amount of text, it's not close in the other direction. It's very difficult to make an apples to apples comparison here.
Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by lostmsu on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:36PM (#50399423)
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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by rcxdude on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:54PM (#50399599)
Last I checked people don't have a digital information stream running from their eyeballs to their brain. It is not the same thing at all.
Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by jibalt on Saturday November 07, 2026 @12:44PM (#50406427)
What they said, which is true, is that an LLM's inputs measured in bytes of language is much higher than for humans. Throwing in all the non-language bytes of sensory input received by humans is not valid and thus is not apples to apples. Children learning from watching a dog do zoomies around the room or butterflies in the garden is not learning language.
Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by lostmsu on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:01PM (#50407038)
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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by suddenlybananas on Friday November 06, 2026 @11:26AM (#50394483)
The BabyLM challenge has shown that multimodal models don't seem to learn in a more data-efficient way with respect to tokens. Adding an unlimited amount of images doesn't help you learn syntactic islands faster.
Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by lostmsu on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:34PM (#50399403)
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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by suddenlybananas on Saturday November 07, 2026 @03:20AM (#50402699)
Not a specific entry, but in four years, there's never been a clear advantage of multimodal models and the results have been extremely lackluckster, even when you allow unbounded images alongside a fixed quantity of text.
Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by lostmsu on Saturday November 07, 2026 @05:52AM (#50403407)
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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by suddenlybananas on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:08AM (#50405190)
You can look at the CFP for the most recent BabyLM https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20092v2 :

"This year, we have merged the Multimodal and Interaction tracks into the Strict and Strict-small tracks. This is for two primary reasons: Firstly, there were insufficient submissions to warrant standalone tracks. Secondly, none of the submissions in the Interaction track outperformed models submitted to the Strict track, and *none of the submissions from Multimodal outperformed our baselines*. We will still allow participants to use multimodal data or interactive training procedures if they choose, but such data or learning procedures must conform to the rules of the Strict or Strict-small tracks.

Emphasis mine.

Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by lostmsu on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:05PM (#50407070)
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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by lostmsu on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:15PM (#50407155)
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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by suddenlybananas on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:55AM (#50412488)
https://aclanthology.org/2025.babylm-main.28/

The multimodal baselines are _lower_ than the text only baselines. See Table 3. In fact, 10M of text outperforms 100M of text + images.