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Yes, the stochastic parrots story is one of the most strong instances in recent times where experts in a field are made blind by their own expertise (the mental

Yes, the stochastic parrots story is one of the most strong instances in recent times where experts in a field are made blind by their own expertise (the mental model they have of certain things) to the point of being incapable of seeing trivial evidences.

vunderba 2y ago
There’s a certain irony in hearing someone describe an LLM as a "stochastic parrot" for the ten-thousandth time when the only reason they’re doing so is that they’ve seen a sufficient number of other people using the exact same term (so now it's in their proverbial training data).
- sitkack 2y ago
  All they do is predict the next word!
- habinero 2y ago
  It's an accurate description, though. People are running around convincing themselves that the RNG text generator is alive and it's worth slapping some sense into them.
  - currymj 2y ago
    it's no longer an accurate description. with recent models, while stitching together training data is still most of the story, there's obviously something more going on, especially with regards to code, mathematics, and with the ability to successfully produce dialogue that respects pragmatics. this has nothing to do with a real thinking being, but it's become different from a stochastic parrot. there are deluded people who think that Claude and ChatGPT are really thinking and feeling. it is admirable to try to argue them out of this position. but if your argument involves saying things that are not true, and anyone can easily see are not true by interacting with a consumer-grade chatbot for 10 minutes, it will just discredit you, and those people will go on believing they're talking to HAL-9000.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      I'm sure that there are people that are deluded into thinking ChatGPT loves them like a real life flesh and blood being can even when it says it can't, but we have such limited vocabulary, especially as laymen, for describing any non-human intelligence, that saying it's thinking and reasoning aren't entirely unreasonable words to describe what it's doing. sure, it's not thinking in the same way a human would, but when a computer, pre-LLM, and even pre-Internet, is doing something that requires the user to wait, saying the computer is "thinking" is an entirely accepted practice. So if we want to get people to stop using the words thinking and reasoning, we have to get replacement words into the lexicon. if I tell an LLM A implies B implies C, and I tell it A is true and it's able to tell me that C is thus also true, sure it's entirely due to that much logic existing in its training corpus, but unless we get to a point where I can say that ChatGPT is dot-producting an essay for me, or some other phrase, saying it's not doing "thinking" is going to fall flat on its face. Hell, Deepseek R1's output for the local model literally says <think>. It may not be thinking in a biological being sense, and it may not be reason in a biological sense to conclude C if A implies B implies C, if A is true, but we lack the common colloquial language to describe it otherwise.
      - currymj 2y ago
        completely agree. people say a classic chess engine is "thinking" when it goes deeper into the search tree, but nobody is confused about that. This colloquial language doesn't bother me so much. But there really are people who think they are talking to something more than that. Like within a conversation with today's consumer product, they sincerely believe that an actual being is instantiated who has goals and intentions and talks to them.
      - habinero 2y ago
        Using language like "thinking" doesn't bother me. I'm not a stickler for precision language in colloquial speech. I do think it's important to deflate the hype and give context to what you mean by "thinking" in products, technologies and so on. Calling it a "stochastic parrot" is a bit pithy but not unreasonable. Plus it's memorable.
    - 2y ago

vunderba 2y ago

There’s a certain irony in hearing someone describe an LLM as a "stochastic parrot" for the ten-thousandth time when the only reason they’re doing so is that they’ve seen a sufficient number of other people using the exact same term (so now it's in their proverbial training data).

sitkack 2y ago
All they do is predict the next word!
habinero 2y ago
It's an accurate description, though. People are running around convincing themselves that the RNG text generator is alive and it's worth slapping some sense into them.
- currymj 2y ago
  it's no longer an accurate description. with recent models, while stitching together training data is still most of the story, there's obviously something more going on, especially with regards to code, mathematics, and with the ability to successfully produce dialogue that respects pragmatics. this has nothing to do with a real thinking being, but it's become different from a stochastic parrot. there are deluded people who think that Claude and ChatGPT are really thinking and feeling. it is admirable to try to argue them out of this position. but if your argument involves saying things that are not true, and anyone can easily see are not true by interacting with a consumer-grade chatbot for 10 minutes, it will just discredit you, and those people will go on believing they're talking to HAL-9000.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I'm sure that there are people that are deluded into thinking ChatGPT loves them like a real life flesh and blood being can even when it says it can't, but we have such limited vocabulary, especially as laymen, for describing any non-human intelligence, that saying it's thinking and reasoning aren't entirely unreasonable words to describe what it's doing. sure, it's not thinking in the same way a human would, but when a computer, pre-LLM, and even pre-Internet, is doing something that requires the user to wait, saying the computer is "thinking" is an entirely accepted practice. So if we want to get people to stop using the words thinking and reasoning, we have to get replacement words into the lexicon. if I tell an LLM A implies B implies C, and I tell it A is true and it's able to tell me that C is thus also true, sure it's entirely due to that much logic existing in its training corpus, but unless we get to a point where I can say that ChatGPT is dot-producting an essay for me, or some other phrase, saying it's not doing "thinking" is going to fall flat on its face. Hell, Deepseek R1's output for the local model literally says <think>. It may not be thinking in a biological being sense, and it may not be reason in a biological sense to conclude C if A implies B implies C, if A is true, but we lack the common colloquial language to describe it otherwise.
    - currymj 2y ago
      completely agree. people say a classic chess engine is "thinking" when it goes deeper into the search tree, but nobody is confused about that. This colloquial language doesn't bother me so much. But there really are people who think they are talking to something more than that. Like within a conversation with today's consumer product, they sincerely believe that an actual being is instantiated who has goals and intentions and talks to them.
    - habinero 2y ago
      Using language like "thinking" doesn't bother me. I'm not a stickler for precision language in colloquial speech. I do think it's important to deflate the hype and give context to what you mean by "thinking" in products, technologies and so on. Calling it a "stochastic parrot" is a bit pithy but not unreasonable. Plus it's memorable.
  - 2y ago