Universal grammar wasn’t his “entire body of work”—for the last 25 years he’s been at the forefront of the Minimalist program which is in no way affected by LLMs. And Chomsky’s criticism of LLMs as a model of the human brain’s language process is perfectly valid: while they can imitate human languages, they can also imitate artificial languages humans would never invent and can’t learn fluently. They’re like Ptolemy’s epicycles, that could accurately replicate the motions of the planets but could also imitate arbitrary orbits that violate Newtonian mechanics.
Universal grammar wasn’t his “entire body of work”—for the last 25 years he’s been at the forefront of the Minimalist program which is in no way affected by LLMs. And Chomsky’s criticism of LLMs as a model of the human brain’s language process is perfectly valid: while they can imitate human languages, they can also imitate artificial languages humans would never invent and can’t learn fluently. They’re like Ptolemy’s epicycles, that could accurately replicate the motions of the planets but could also imitate arbitrary orbits that violate Newtonian mechanics.