Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (born 1928) revolutionized linguistics in the 1950s with the theory of universal grammar, spent decades at MIT, and became one of the most cited scholars in history — as well as one of America’s most prominent political dissidents. His argument that human language springs from an innate, rule-generating faculty has been the chief intellectual rival to statistical approaches to language for half a century, which makes large language models a direct assault on his life’s work.

“The False Promise of ChatGPT”

In a January 2023 EduKitchen interview he shrugged ChatGPT off as “basically high-tech plagiarism” and “a way of avoiding learning.” That March, with linguist Ian Roberts and philosopher Jeffrey Watumull, he published “The False Promise of ChatGPT” in The New York Times — the most-read intellectual broadside of the AI era. The essay argued that a child acquires language from scant data via an innate grammar while LLMs merely memorize and extrapolate, that such systems can learn impossible languages as easily as real ones and therefore explain nothing, and that their forced neutrality amounts to “the banality of evil.” It conceded the tools might help with narrow chores like coding or rhyming.

The piece drew fierce rebuttals — critics noted LLMs were already doing things the essay declared impossible, and researchers challenged its claims about impossible languages empirically — while defenders like Gary Marcus argued he was being caricatured. It was among Chomsky’s final major public statements: he suffered a severe stroke in 2023, and his wife confirmed in 2024 that he had largely withdrawn from public life.