A lot of people held onto this view deep into the GPT era but now even the skeptics have to begrudgingly admit that NNs are pretty big progress even if additional Special Sauce is needed
It’s a bit tangential to the context, but this is a topic I have an ongoing interest in: what leads you to believe that the skeptics (in particular NLP people in the linguistics community) have shifted away from their previous positions? My impression has been that many of them (though not all) have failed to really update to any significant degree. Eg here’s a paper from just last month which argues that we must not mistake the mere engineering that is LLM behavior for language understanding or production.
It’s a bit tangential to the context, but this is a topic I have an ongoing interest in: what leads you to believe that the skeptics (in particular NLP people in the linguistics community) have shifted away from their previous positions? My impression has been that many of them (though not all) have failed to really update to any significant degree. Eg here’s a paper from just last month which argues that we must not mistake the mere engineering that is LLM behavior for language understanding or production.