Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
by mturmon on Saturday November 07, 2026 @12:58AM
(#50402050)
Peter makes some excellent points in TFA and it’s a fun read.
But the situation has moved on.
In particular, LLMs are telling us a lot about those low-probability, never before seen sentences — it’s called CALU, the creative aspects of language use.
LLMs exhibit CALU; they will happily create such sentences. And inspecting the LLMs does provide insight:
“It does change the epistemic situation substantially. A working system can be inspected, perturbed, retrained, lesioned, and compared with other systems. Building is not understanding, but it gives understanding a strong foothold.
Explaining creative language use in LLMs would not, by itself, explain creative language use in humans. But the artificial case matters even if the mechanisms turn out to be substantially different. At a minimum, LLMs are an existence proof of one pathway by which open-ended, context-sensitive language can arise.”
For much more, see this substack by Chandra Sripada, a U of Michigan linguist:
But the situation has moved on.
In particular, LLMs are telling us a lot about those low-probability, never before seen sentences — it’s called CALU, the creative aspects of language use.
LLMs exhibit CALU; they will happily create such sentences. And inspecting the LLMs does provide insight:
“It does change the epistemic situation substantially. A working system can be inspected, perturbed, retrained, lesioned, and compared with other systems. Building is not understanding, but it gives understanding a strong foothold.
Explaining creative language use in LLMs would not, by itself, explain creative language use in humans. But the artificial case matters even if the mechanisms turn out to be substantially different. At a minimum, LLMs are an existence proof of one pathway by which open-ended, context-sensitive language can arise.”
For much more, see this substack by Chandra Sripada, a U of Michigan linguist:
https://chandrasripada.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-retreat-of-...
He is interviewed by Sean Carroll on his excellent Mindscape podcast:
https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/10/363-chan...