I had always had wanted to ask him if he didn’t think now that his critique of BF Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” had been wrong after all, and that LLMs are the experimental proof of Skinner’s idea that simple conditioning can give rise to something that, to us, looks like intelligence.<p>Now I’ll never know.<p>(But maybe the two of them can have a discussion now in the afterlife, now that their worldly egos and public opinion are out of the way.)