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> I take Chomsky's points to be the following: 1. Statistical language models have had engineering success, but that is irrelevant to science.

Well, deep neural nets are not statistical models, so shouldn't Chomsky now be at least a little bit happier with ChatGPT?




How so? Deep neural nets and ChatGPT are very much statistical models.


> How so?

They don't fit the definition [1,2,3]. But I looked at the internet, and apparently many people consider neural nets to be statistical models, or "a kind of" statistical models.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_model

[2] https://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~pmcc/pubs/AOS023.pdf

[3] https://www.statlect.com/glossary/statistical-model


What does it mean to be a statistical model? Deep nets are deterministic, for example. We can use them to model probability distributions, but they are not intrinsically statistical.




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