2. The Chinese Room argument can invite itself back out, as always. It was never more than an intuition pump and not a very good one.
3. Universal Grammar doesn't really figure into it one way or the other. LLMs don't work the way we do, despite being "neural". They get their basic grammar from a very different place. Chomsky's arguments are doing fine, though this is a great time to look at them through new lenses.
> I personally remember very heated arguments on the MIT campus between Chomsky followers and computer scientists working on statistical models in the early 2000’s. The arguments came up in computer science faculty hiring meetings. The Chomskians claimed that because of the need for universal grammar there would never be anything useful that came out of statistical approaches to language. ChatGPT has proved them wrong. (And yes, I personally shouted angrily at Chomskians in some of those hiring meetings.)
A related argument is that you can predict the weather using a neural net but that doesn't mean that the weather works like a neural network and it doesn't tell you anything about how weather does work.