The language of everyday interaction tends to be messy and incomplete, and chaotic, leading many language scientists to believe that children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience, writes Morten Christiansen, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology, in an op-ed in Ars Technica.
“But new insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence,” Christiansen and co-author Paulo Contreras Kallens write in the piece. “A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry, and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.”
Simon Wheeler, Cornell University
Cornell Provost Kavita Bala speaking with Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholar Naomi Havron at the Kalaniyot reception Oct. 19. In the background, Kalaniyot Fellow Eden Eran Nagar speaks with Fellow Shachar Yerushalmi.
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Seidenberger built Hopper from scratch so students can see the logic on which it is built and play a role in developing it and improving it over the course of his class.
