You’re being downvoted, perhaps because your tone is a little harsh, but you’re not wrong: people really are still making versions of the “stochastic parrots” a

You’re being downvoted, perhaps because your tone is a little harsh, but you’re not wrong: people really are still making versions of the “stochastic parrots” argument. It comes up again and again, on hacker news and elsewhere. And yet a few months ago an LLM got gold on the Mathematical Olympiad. “Stochastic parrots” just isn’t a useful metaphor anymore. I find AI hype as annoying as anyone, and LLMs do have all sorts of failure modes, some of which are related to how they are trained. But at this point they are doing things that many people (including me) would have flatly denied was possible with this architecture 3 years ago during the initial ChatGPT hype. When the facts change we need to change our opinions, and like you say, reckon anew with the thing that’s sitting in front of us.