[ExI] Emily M. Bender — Language Models and Linguistics (video interview)

[Gordon Swobe]

Professor Bender pulls no punches in her tweets to her twitter followers,
of which I am now one.

"Love to see how people complain about "criticism lobbed at LLMs" &c.
Folks: the criticism isn't of the models. It's of the people (often on
behalf of corporations) making false claims abt the models for the purposes
of profit, consolidating power, and feeding their AGI fantasies. Your LLMs
aren't in need of protecting. They don't have feelings. They aren't little
baby proto-AGIs in need of nurturing."

Ha.

https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1639640791084838914?s=20

-gts




On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 3:29 PM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com> wrote:

> I mentioned Emily Pender in another thread. She is Professor of
> Linguistics and Faculty Director of the Master's Program in Computational
> Linguistics at University of Washington.
>
> In the other thread, I made the mistake of introducing her with her
> Octopus thought experiment which I soon realized from the responses here is
> easily misinterpreted outside of the context of her general thesis and the
> academic paper in which she introduced it.
>
> As I learned from this interview, she and her colleague Koller wrote that
> paper in response to a twitter debate in which she found herself arguing
> with non-linguists who insist that language models understand language.
> Like me, she is critical of such claims. She considers them "hype."
>
> The relevant material starts at the 26 minute mark.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaxNN3YRhBA
>
>
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