A Precis of Language Models are not Models of Language

Natural Language Processing is one of the leading application areas in the current resurgence of Artificial Intelligence, spearheaded by Artificial Neural Networks. We show that despite their many successes at performing linguistic tasks, Large Neural Language Models are ill-suited as comprehensive models of natural language. The wider implication is that, in spite of the often overbearing optimism about AI, modern neural models do not represent a revolution in our understanding of cognition.