Taxonomizing Arguments for Language Model Skepticism in the Language of the Theory of Computation

Alongside acknowledgement of genuine success and hype, language models (LMs), and in particular autoregressive language models (ALMs), have attracted skepticism: many believe that they are inherently limited in their capabilities. We systematically translate arguments for skepticism into the more precise language of the theory of computation. We contribute novel formalizations of several prominent arguments that were previously only described informally. We aim to enable analyses of skepticism of LMs that are more systematic and precise, and to distinguish conjecture, intuition, and formally proven results.