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Excerpt from the New York Times:
The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.
For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing — unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought. When linguists seek to develop a theory for why a given language works as it does (“Why are these — but not those — sentences considered grammatical?”), they are building consciously and laboriously an explicit version of the grammar that the child builds instinctively and with minimal exposure to information. The child’s operating system is completely different from that of a machine learning program.
Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution...
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