'The king (Chomsky) is dead': why linguists seethe at LLMs instead of celebrating
repligate · x · 2026-08-22
A viral thread on researcher motivation: voooooogel recalls being confused that linguists — people who ostensibly care about language — ignored and dismissed deep learning and GPT-3, eventually driving him to mechinterp and rationalist circles.
The replier adds that his linguist friends 'seethe' at the topic: 'LLMs falsified the field. But shouldn't that be exciting? The king (Chomsky) is dead, there's an opening!' — capturing the deep tension between traditional linguistics and empirical NLP.
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