Flutterby™! : Machine Learning won't solve Natural Language Understanding

The Gradient: Machine Learning Won't Solve Natural Language Understanding

This misguided trend has resulted, in our opinion, in an unfortunate state of affairs: an insistence on building NLP systems using ‘large language models’ (LLM) that require massive computing power in a futile attempt at trying to approximate the infinite object we call natural language by trying to memorize massive amounts of data. In our opinion this pseudo-scientific method is not only a waste of time and resources, but it is corrupting a generation of young scientists by luring them into thinking that language is just data – a path that will only lead to disappointments and, worse yet, to hampering any real progress in natural language understanding (NLU).