My Advisors Argued This for Thirty Years. Now You Can Check
Inside the Black Box: Cracking AI and Deep LearningShow Notes
Thirty years ago, the authors of Rethinking Innateness argued that grammar could come out of a learner with no grammar built in. Nobody could check it. Now there's an instrument. A reading of the Inside the Black Box essay on what Elman, Bates, and Karmiloff-Smith would make of transformer language models — attention as a lookup, structure nobody installed, and the part that isn't there.
Read the essay: https://arshavirblackwell.substack.com/p/what-would-my-advisors-make-of-llms
More from Inside the Black Box: Cracking AI and Deep Learning
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Can a model learn past tense the way children seem to, if you remove the tokenizer from the equation? This final installment tests raw letters and raw sound, probes whether a U-shaped pattern can be forced, and shows why the answer points to distributed, frequency-driven learning rather than a discrete rule.
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This episode explores a modern twist on Jean Berko’s famous wug test, comparing how large language models handle made-up verbs versus familiar ones. It digs into tokenization, internal feature probes, and why neural networks seem to approximate grammar through probabilistic patterns rather than clean symbolic rules.