# Are Language Models Models?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10421 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10421/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 98 of its 356 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 98)

- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06499/) (2021)
- [BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00582/) (2019)
- [The Platonic Representation Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07987/) (2024)
- [Assessing the Ability of LSTMs to Learn Syntax-Sensitive Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01368/) (2016)
- [Theoretical Limitations of Self-Attention in Neural Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06755/) (2019)
- [Inductive Biases for Deep Learning of Higher-Level Cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15091/) (2020)
- [Estimating the Carbon Footprint of BLOOM, a 176B Parameter Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02001/) (2022)
- [Causal Abstraction: A Theoretical Foundation for Mechanistic Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04709/) (2023)
- [Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16863/) (2023)
- [The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13966/) (2022)
- [Neural Language Models as Psycholinguistic Subjects: Representations of Syntactic State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03260/) (2019)
- [How much do language models copy from their training data? Evaluating linguistic novelty in text generation using RAVEN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09509/) (2021)
- [Systematic Inequalities in Language Technology Performance across the World's Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06733/) (2021)
- [On The Landscape of Spoken Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08528/) (2025)
- [On the Practical Computational Power of Finite Precision RNNs for Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04908/) (2018)
- [Why Does Surprisal From Larger Transformer-Based Language Models Provide a Poorer Fit to Human Reading Times?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12131/) (2022)
- [Findings of the BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08165/) (2025)
- [What do RNN Language Models Learn about Filler-Gap Dependencies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00042/) (2018)
- [Physics of Language Models: Part 1, Learning Hierarchical Language Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13673/) (2023)
- [Training Trajectories of Language Models Across Scales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09803/) (2022)
- [Testing the Predictions of Surprisal Theory in 11 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03667/) (2023)
- [Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09963/) (2024)
- [How Deep Neural Networks Learn Compositional Data: The Random Hierarchy Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02129/) (2023)
- [A fine-grained comparison of pragmatic language understanding in humans and language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06801/) (2022)
- [Cognitive Science in the era of Artificial Intelligence: A roadmap for reverse-engineering the infant language-learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08723/) (2016)
- [Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rare Phenomena: The Case of the Missing AANNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19827/) (2024)
- [What Do Self-Supervised Speech Models Know About Words?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00162/) (2023)
- [RNNs can generate bounded hierarchical languages with optimal memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07515/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models Share Representations of Latent Grammatical Concepts Across Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06346/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Futrell and Mahowald claim LMs "serve as model systems", but an assessment at each of Marr's three levels suggests the claim is clearly not true at the implementation level, poorly motivated at the algorithmic-representational level, and problematic at the computational theory level. LMs are good candidates as tools; calling them cognitive models overstates the case and unnecessarily feeds LLM hype.