Large language models have learned to use language

2025/12/13 by Gary Lupyan, Lupyan, Gary · 2 voices
#cs.CL

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.12447

Abstract

Acknowledging that large language models have learned to use language can open doors to breakthrough language science. Achieving these breakthroughs may require abandoning some long-held ideas about how language knowledge is evaluated and reckoning with the difficult fact that we have entered a post-Turing test era.

Discussions

• My commentary on @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social excellent forthcoming BBS paper "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models". arxiv.org/abs/2512.12447 Have a [bsky, 31 points, 3 comments]
• Cf. @glupyan.bsky.social "Understanding whether the ability to make explicit grammatical judgments is causally related to being able to use language would be a fascinating development." arxiv.org/pdf/ [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]

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