Why Linguists Left the AI Room
Large language models are, at their core, language technologies. So why did the people who study language for a living become peripheral to building them? This episode traces the hidden linguistic DNA inside the transformer architecture — from Jakob Uszkoreit's parse-tree insight to the raising-versus-control distinction that models seem to have internalized without being taught — and asks what got lost when the frontier moved from theory-driven NLP to compute-and-data-driven pretraining. We work through the three positions in the current debate: insulationism, eliminativism, and…
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