Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since Aristotle, who wrote that humanity was “the animal that has language.” Even as large language models such as ChatGPT superficially replicate ordinary speech, researchers want to know if there are specific aspects of human language that simply have no parallels in the communication systems of other animals or artificially intelligent devices.
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(opens a new tab) 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.