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Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by theptip on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:31PM (#50399936)
A newborn brain is not a blank slate, it comes with a very rich prior (as Chomsky himself would argue), for example the ability to rapidly acquire language, control a body, etc.

An LLM must construct all of its grammatical structure, world models, etc. from scratch during pretraining.

LLM pre-training is more like recapitulating evolution of the mammalian brain than childhood development.

Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning by suddenlybananas on Saturday November 07, 2026 @03:24AM (#50402720)
Of course children are not a blank state. My point is to argue that LLMs are not an argument against UG.