(Quanta Magazine) – If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

In particular, researchers have been exploring the extent to which language models can reason about language itself. For some in the linguistic community, language models not only don’t have reasoning abilities, they can’t. This view was summed up by Noam Chomsky, a prominent linguist, and two co-authors in 2023, when they wrote in The New York Times that “the correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data.” AI models may be adept at using language, these researchers argued, but they’re not capable of analyzing language in a sophisticated way.

That view was challenged in a recent paper by Gašper Beguš, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley; Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who recently received his doctorate in linguistics at Berkeley; and Ryan Rhodes of Rutgers University. (Read More)