My Advisors Argued This for Thirty Years. Now You Can Check

Thirty years ago, the authors of Rethinking Innateness argued that grammar could come out of a learner with no grammar built in. Nobody could check it. Now there's an instrument. A reading of the Inside the Black Box essay on what Elman, Bates, and Karmiloff-Smith would make of transformer language models — attention as a lookup, structure nobody installed, and the part that isn't there.

Read the essay: https://arshavirblackwell.substack.com/p/what-would-my-advisors-make-of-llms