5 ms·

anyone saying an LLM is a stochastic parrot doesn't understand them... they are just parroting what they heard.

by danielmarkbruce 2y ago

bloomingkales 2y ago
There is definitely a mini cult of people that want to be very right about how everyone else is very wrong about AI.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  ie, the people that AI is dumb? Or you are saying I'm in a cult for being pro it - I'm definitely part of that cult - the "we already have agi and you have to contort yourself into a pretzel to believe otherwise" cult. Not sure if there is a leader though.
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    I didn't realize my post can be interpreted either way. I'll leave it ambiguous, hah. Place your bets I guess.
  - jamiek88 2y ago
    You think we have AGI? What makes you think that?
    - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
      By knowing what each of the letters stand for
      - jamiek88 2y ago
        Well that’s disappointing. It was an extraordinary claim that really interested me. Thought I was about to be learn! Instead, I just met an asshole.
        danielmarkbruce 2y ago
        When someone says "i'm in the cult that believes X", don't expect a water tight argument for the existence of X.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- mlinsey 2y ago
  There are a couple Twitter personalities that definitely fit this description. There is also a much bigger group of people that haven't really tried anything beyond GPT-3.5, which was the best you could get without paying a monthly subscription for a long time. One of the biggest reasons for r1 hype, besides the geopolitical angle, was people could actually try a reasoning model for free for the first time.
- ggm 2y ago
  Firstly this is meta ad hom. You're ignoring the argument to target the speaker(s) Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that the community of voices with experience in data sciences, computer science and artificial intelligence themselves are split on the qualities or lack of them in current AI. GPT and LLM are very interesting but say little or nothing to me of new theory of mind, or display inductive logic and reasoning, or even meet the bar for a philosophers cave solution to problems. We've been here before so many, many times. "Just a bit more power captain" was very strong in connectionist theories of mind. fMRI brains activity analytics, you name it. So yes. There are a lot of "us" who are pushing back on the hype, and no we're not a mini cult.
  - visarga 2y ago
    > GPT and LLM are very interesting but say little or nothing to me of new theory of mind, or display inductive logic and reasoning, or even meet the bar for a philosophers cave solution to problems. The simple fact they can generate language so well makes me think... maybe language itself carries more weight than we originally thought. LLMs can get to this point without personal experience and embodiment, it should not have been possible, but here we are. I think philosophers are lagging science now. The RL paradigm of agent-environment-reward based learning seems to me a better one than what we have in philiosophy now. And if you look at how LLMs model language as high dimensional embedding spaces .. this could solve many intractable philosophical problems, like the infinite homunculus regress problem. Relational representations straddle the midpoint between 1st and 3rd person, offering a possible path over the hard problem "gap".
ggm 2y ago
A good literary production. I would have been proud of it had I thought of it, but it's a path to observe a strong "whataboutery" element that if we use "stochastic parrot" as shorthand and you dislike the term, now you understand why we dislike the constant use of "infer", "reason" and "hallucinate" Parrots are self aware, complex reasoning brains which can solve problems in geometry, tell lies, and act socially or asocially. They also have complex vocal chords and can perform mimicry. Very few aspects of a parrots behaviour are stochastic but that also underplays how complex stochastic systems can be in their production. If we label LLM products as Stochastic Parrots it does not mean they like cuttlefish bones or are demonstrably modelled by Markov chains like Mark V Shaney.
- gsam 2y ago
  I don't like wading into this debate when semantics are very personal/subjective. But to me, it seems like almost a sleight of hand to add the stochastic part, when actually they're possibly weighted more on the parrot part. Parrots are much more concrete, whereas the term LLM could refer to the general architecture. The question to me seems: If we expand on this architecture (in some direction, compute, size etc.), will we get something much more powerful? Whereas if you give nature more time to iterate on the parrot, you'd probably still end up with a parrot. There's a giant impedance mismatch here (time scaling being one). Unless people want to think of parrots being a subset of all animals, and so 'stochastic animal' is what they mean. But then it's really the difference of 'stochastic human' and 'human'. And I don't think people really want to face that particular distinction.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    I'm sure both of you know this, but "stochastic parrot" refers to the title of a research article that contained a particular argument about LLM limitations that had very little to do with parrots.
    - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
      The term is much more broadly known than the content of that (rather silly) paper.... I'm not even certain that it's the first use of the term.

anyone saying an LLM is a stochastic parrot doesn't understand them... they are just parroting what they heard.

bloomingkales 2y ago

There is definitely a mini cult of people that want to be very right about how everyone else is very wrong about AI.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
ie, the people that AI is dumb? Or you are saying I'm in a cult for being pro it - I'm definitely part of that cult - the "we already have agi and you have to contort yourself into a pretzel to believe otherwise" cult. Not sure if there is a leader though.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  I didn't realize my post can be interpreted either way. I'll leave it ambiguous, hah. Place your bets I guess.
- jamiek88 2y ago
  You think we have AGI? What makes you think that?
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    By knowing what each of the letters stand for
    - jamiek88 2y ago
      Well that’s disappointing. It was an extraordinary claim that really interested me. Thought I was about to be learn! Instead, I just met an asshole.
      - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
        When someone says "i'm in the cult that believes X", don't expect a water tight argument for the existence of X.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
mlinsey 2y ago
There are a couple Twitter personalities that definitely fit this description. There is also a much bigger group of people that haven't really tried anything beyond GPT-3.5, which was the best you could get without paying a monthly subscription for a long time. One of the biggest reasons for r1 hype, besides the geopolitical angle, was people could actually try a reasoning model for free for the first time.
ggm 2y ago
Firstly this is meta ad hom. You're ignoring the argument to target the speaker(s) Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that the community of voices with experience in data sciences, computer science and artificial intelligence themselves are split on the qualities or lack of them in current AI. GPT and LLM are very interesting but say little or nothing to me of new theory of mind, or display inductive logic and reasoning, or even meet the bar for a philosophers cave solution to problems. We've been here before so many, many times. "Just a bit more power captain" was very strong in connectionist theories of mind. fMRI brains activity analytics, you name it. So yes. There are a lot of "us" who are pushing back on the hype, and no we're not a mini cult.
- visarga 2y ago
  > GPT and LLM are very interesting but say little or nothing to me of new theory of mind, or display inductive logic and reasoning, or even meet the bar for a philosophers cave solution to problems. The simple fact they can generate language so well makes me think... maybe language itself carries more weight than we originally thought. LLMs can get to this point without personal experience and embodiment, it should not have been possible, but here we are. I think philosophers are lagging science now. The RL paradigm of agent-environment-reward based learning seems to me a better one than what we have in philiosophy now. And if you look at how LLMs model language as high dimensional embedding spaces .. this could solve many intractable philosophical problems, like the infinite homunculus regress problem. Relational representations straddle the midpoint between 1st and 3rd person, offering a possible path over the hard problem "gap".

ggm 2y ago

A good literary production. I would have been proud of it had I thought of it, but it's a path to observe a strong "whataboutery" element that if we use "stochastic parrot" as shorthand and you dislike the term, now you understand why we dislike the constant use of "infer", "reason" and "hallucinate" Parrots are self aware, complex reasoning brains which can solve problems in geometry, tell lies, and act socially or asocially. They also have complex vocal chords and can perform mimicry. Very few aspects of a parrots behaviour are stochastic but that also underplays how complex stochastic systems can be in their production. If we label LLM products as Stochastic Parrots it does not mean they like cuttlefish bones or are demonstrably modelled by Markov chains like Mark V Shaney.

gsam 2y ago
I don't like wading into this debate when semantics are very personal/subjective. But to me, it seems like almost a sleight of hand to add the stochastic part, when actually they're possibly weighted more on the parrot part. Parrots are much more concrete, whereas the term LLM could refer to the general architecture. The question to me seems: If we expand on this architecture (in some direction, compute, size etc.), will we get something much more powerful? Whereas if you give nature more time to iterate on the parrot, you'd probably still end up with a parrot. There's a giant impedance mismatch here (time scaling being one). Unless people want to think of parrots being a subset of all animals, and so 'stochastic animal' is what they mean. But then it's really the difference of 'stochastic human' and 'human'. And I don't think people really want to face that particular distinction.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I'm sure both of you know this, but "stochastic parrot" refers to the title of a research article that contained a particular argument about LLM limitations that had very little to do with parrots.
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    The term is much more broadly known than the content of that (rather silly) paper.... I'm not even certain that it's the first use of the term.