Maybe I am missing context, but it seems like he’s defending himself from the claim that we shouldn’t bother studying language acquisition and comprehension in humans because of LLM’s?

Who would make such a claim? LLM’s are of course incredible, but it seems obvious that their mechanism is quite different than the human brain.

I think the best you can say is that one could motivate lines of inquiry in human understanding, especially because we can essentially do brain surgery on an LLM in action in a way that we can’t with humans.