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Exactly 2 years ago I remember people calling AI stochastic parrots with no actual intellectual capability and people on HN weren’t remotely worried that AI wou

Exactly 2 years ago I remember people calling AI stochastic parrots with no actual intellectual capability and people on HN weren’t remotely worried that AI would take over there jobs. I mean in 2 years the entire mentality shifted. Most people on HN were just completely and utterly wrong (also quite embarrassing if you read how self assured these people were, this is like 70 percent of HN at the time). First AI is clearly not a stochastic parrot and second it hasn’t taken our jobs yet but we can all see that potential up ahead. Now we get articles like this saying your skills will atrophy with AI because the entire industry is using it now. I think it’s clear. Everyone’s skills will atrophy. This is the future. I fully expect in the coming decades that the generation after zoomers have never coded ever without the assistance of AI and they will have an even harder time finding jobs in software. Also: because the change happened so fast you see tons of pockets of people who aren’t caught up yet. People who don’t realize that the above is the overarching reality. You’ll know you’re one of these people if AI hasn’t basically taken over your work place and you and your coworkers aren’t going all in on Claude or Codex. Give it another 2 years and everyone will flip here too.

data-ottawa 11mo ago
How is AI not a stochastic parrot? That’s exactly what it is. That never precluded it from being useful.
- mmoll 11mo ago
  Exactly. After all, how can WE confidently claim that we’re more than stochastic parrots?
- throwway120385 11mo ago
  Yeah -- stochastic just implies a probabilistic method. It's just that when you include enough parameters your probabilities start to match the actual space of acceptable results really really well. In other words, we started to throw memory at the problem and the results got better. But it doesn't change the fundamentals of the approach.
- RationPhantoms 11mo ago
  In my experience, it's not that the term itself is incorrect but more so people use it as a bludgeoning force to end conversations about the technology. Rather than, what should happen, is to invite nuance about how it can be utilized and it's pitfalls.
  - threethirtytwo 11mo ago
    Colloquially, it just means there’s no thinking or logic going on. LLMs are just pattern matching an answer. From what we do know about LLMs we do know that it is not trivial pattern matching, the output formulated is literally by the definition of machine learning itself completely original information not copied from the training data.
- pegasus 11mo ago
  And a parrot (or human) is not stochastic? The truth is we don't actually know. So the usually included "just" is unjustified.
mjr00 11mo ago
But AI is still a stochastic parrot with no actual intellectual capability... who actually believes otherwise? I figured most people had played with local models enough by now to understand that it's just math underneath. It's extremely useful, but laughably far from intelligence, as anyone who has attempted to use Claude et al for anything nontrivial knows.
- pegasus 11mo ago
  Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we...
  - xgulfie 11mo ago
    "They convinced the investors so they must be right"
  - mjr00 11mo ago
    > Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we... The money is never wrong! That's why the $100 billion invested in blockchain companies from 2020 to 2023 worked out so well. Or why Mark Zuckerberg's $50 billion investment in the Metaverse resulted in a world-changing paradigm shift.
    - bena 11mo ago
      It's not that the money can predict what is correct, it's that it can tell us where people's values lie. Those people who invested cash in blockchain believed that they could develop something worthwhile on the blockchain. Zuckerberg believed the Metaverse could change things. It's why he hired all of those people to work on it. However, what you have here are people claiming LLMs are going to be writing 90% of code in the next 18 months, then turning around and hiring a bunch of people to write code. There's another article posted here, "Believe the Checkbook" or something like that. And they point out that Anthropic had no reason to purchase Bun except to get the people working on it. And if you believe we're about to turn a corner on vibe coding, you don't do that.
rybosworld 11mo ago
About a year ago, another commenter said this in response to the question "Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?": > "I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time." Even a year ago that seemed like a ridiculous thing to say. LLM's have made one thing very clear to me: A massive percentage of developers derive their sense of self worth from how smart coding makes them feel.
- jmathai 11mo ago
  AI doesn't need or care about "high quality" code in the same ways we define it. It needs to understand the system so that it can evolve it to meet evolving requirements. It's not bound by tech debt in the same way humans are. That being said, what will be critical is understanding business needs and being able to articulate them in a manner that computers (not humans) can translate into software.
- threethirtytwo 11mo ago
  Yes. If one thing is universal among people is that they can’t fully accept reality at face value if that reality is violating their identity. What has to happen first is that people need to rebuild their identity before they can accept what is happening and that rebuilding process will take longer then the rate at which AI is outrunning all of us. What is my role in tech if for the past 20 years I was a code ninja but now AI can do better than me? I can become a delegator or manager to AI, a prompt wizard or some leadership role… but even this is a target for replacement by AI.
bena 11mo ago
So what you're saying is that two years ago, people were saying that AI won't take our jobs. And that it hasn't taken our jobs. Fascinating.
- threethirtytwo 11mo ago
  It will bro. It also has already taken junior jobs. The market is hard for them.
  - mjr00 11mo ago
    > It also has already taken junior jobs. Correction: it has been a convenient excuse for large tech companies to cut junior jobs after ridiculous hiring sprees during COVID/ZIRP.
    - threethirtytwo 11mo ago
      That’s part of it. You’d be lying to yourself if you think AI didn’t take junior jobs as well.
  - dragonwriter 11mo ago
    > It also has already taken junior jobs. Well, its taken blame for the job cutting due to the broad growth slowdown since COVID fiscal and monetary stimulus was stopped and replaced with monetary tightening, and then most recently the economy was hit with the additional hammers of the Trump tariff and immigration policies, as lots of people want to obscure, deny, and distract from the general economic malaise (and because many of the companies, and even more of their big investors, involved are in incestuous investment relationships with AI companies, so "blaming" AI for the cuts is also a form of self-serving promotion.)
tomku 11mo ago
Two years ago there were also hundreds of people constantly panic-posting here about how our jobs would be gone in a month, that learning anything about programming was now a waste of time and the entire profession was already dead, with all other knowledge work guaranteed to follow. People were posting about how they were considering giving up on CS degrees because AI would make them pointless. The people who used language like "stochastic parrots" were regularly mocked by AI enthusiasts, and the AI enthusiasts were then mocked in return for their absurd claims about fast take-off and imminent AGI. It was a cesspool of bad takes coming from basically every angle, strengthening in certainty as they bounced off each other's idiocy. Your memory of the discourse of that era has apparently been filtered by your brain in order to support the point you want to make. Nobody who thoughtlessly adopted an extreme position at a hinge point where the future was genuinely uncertain came out of that looking particularly good.
- threethirtytwo 11mo ago
  Bro. You’re gonna have a hard time finding people panic posting about how they’re going to lose their jobs in a month. Literally find me one. Then show me that the majority of people posting were panicking. That is literally not what happened. You’re hallucinating. The majority of people on HN were so confident in their coding abilities that they weren’t worried at all. Just a cursory glance at the conversations back then and that is what you will see OVERALL.
bigstrat2003 11mo ago
> First AI is clearly not a stochastic parrot No it very clearly is. Even still today, it is obvious that it has zero understanding of anything and it's just parroting training data arranged in different ways.
- threethirtytwo 11mo ago
  No. Many of the answers it produces can only be attributed to intelligence. Not all but a many can be. We can prove that these answers are not parroted. As for “understanding” we can only infer this from input and output. We can’t actually know if it “understands” because we don’t actually know how these things work and in addition to that, we don’t have a formal definition of what “understanding” is.

data-ottawa 11mo ago

How is AI not a stochastic parrot? That’s exactly what it is. That never precluded it from being useful.

mmoll 11mo ago
Exactly. After all, how can WE confidently claim that we’re more than stochastic parrots?
throwway120385 11mo ago
Yeah -- stochastic just implies a probabilistic method. It's just that when you include enough parameters your probabilities start to match the actual space of acceptable results really really well. In other words, we started to throw memory at the problem and the results got better. But it doesn't change the fundamentals of the approach.
RationPhantoms 11mo ago
In my experience, it's not that the term itself is incorrect but more so people use it as a bludgeoning force to end conversations about the technology. Rather than, what should happen, is to invite nuance about how it can be utilized and it's pitfalls.
- threethirtytwo 11mo ago
  Colloquially, it just means there’s no thinking or logic going on. LLMs are just pattern matching an answer. From what we do know about LLMs we do know that it is not trivial pattern matching, the output formulated is literally by the definition of machine learning itself completely original information not copied from the training data.
pegasus 11mo ago
And a parrot (or human) is not stochastic? The truth is we don't actually know. So the usually included "just" is unjustified.

mjr00 11mo ago

But AI is still a stochastic parrot with no actual intellectual capability... who actually believes otherwise? I figured most people had played with local models enough by now to understand that it's just math underneath. It's extremely useful, but laughably far from intelligence, as anyone who has attempted to use Claude et al for anything nontrivial knows.

pegasus 11mo ago
Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we...
- xgulfie 11mo ago
  "They convinced the investors so they must be right"
- mjr00 11mo ago
  > Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we... The money is never wrong! That's why the $100 billion invested in blockchain companies from 2020 to 2023 worked out so well. Or why Mark Zuckerberg's $50 billion investment in the Metaverse resulted in a world-changing paradigm shift.
  - bena 11mo ago
    It's not that the money can predict what is correct, it's that it can tell us where people's values lie. Those people who invested cash in blockchain believed that they could develop something worthwhile on the blockchain. Zuckerberg believed the Metaverse could change things. It's why he hired all of those people to work on it. However, what you have here are people claiming LLMs are going to be writing 90% of code in the next 18 months, then turning around and hiring a bunch of people to write code. There's another article posted here, "Believe the Checkbook" or something like that. And they point out that Anthropic had no reason to purchase Bun except to get the people working on it. And if you believe we're about to turn a corner on vibe coding, you don't do that.

rybosworld 11mo ago

About a year ago, another commenter said this in response to the question "Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?": > "I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time." Even a year ago that seemed like a ridiculous thing to say. LLM's have made one thing very clear to me: A massive percentage of developers derive their sense of self worth from how smart coding makes them feel.

jmathai 11mo ago
AI doesn't need or care about "high quality" code in the same ways we define it. It needs to understand the system so that it can evolve it to meet evolving requirements. It's not bound by tech debt in the same way humans are. That being said, what will be critical is understanding business needs and being able to articulate them in a manner that computers (not humans) can translate into software.
threethirtytwo 11mo ago
Yes. If one thing is universal among people is that they can’t fully accept reality at face value if that reality is violating their identity. What has to happen first is that people need to rebuild their identity before they can accept what is happening and that rebuilding process will take longer then the rate at which AI is outrunning all of us. What is my role in tech if for the past 20 years I was a code ninja but now AI can do better than me? I can become a delegator or manager to AI, a prompt wizard or some leadership role… but even this is a target for replacement by AI.

bena 11mo ago

So what you're saying is that two years ago, people were saying that AI won't take our jobs. And that it hasn't taken our jobs. Fascinating.

threethirtytwo 11mo ago
It will bro. It also has already taken junior jobs. The market is hard for them.
- mjr00 11mo ago
  > It also has already taken junior jobs. Correction: it has been a convenient excuse for large tech companies to cut junior jobs after ridiculous hiring sprees during COVID/ZIRP.
  - threethirtytwo 11mo ago
    That’s part of it. You’d be lying to yourself if you think AI didn’t take junior jobs as well.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago
  > It also has already taken junior jobs. Well, its taken blame for the job cutting due to the broad growth slowdown since COVID fiscal and monetary stimulus was stopped and replaced with monetary tightening, and then most recently the economy was hit with the additional hammers of the Trump tariff and immigration policies, as lots of people want to obscure, deny, and distract from the general economic malaise (and because many of the companies, and even more of their big investors, involved are in incestuous investment relationships with AI companies, so "blaming" AI for the cuts is also a form of self-serving promotion.)

tomku 11mo ago

Two years ago there were also hundreds of people constantly panic-posting here about how our jobs would be gone in a month, that learning anything about programming was now a waste of time and the entire profession was already dead, with all other knowledge work guaranteed to follow. People were posting about how they were considering giving up on CS degrees because AI would make them pointless. The people who used language like "stochastic parrots" were regularly mocked by AI enthusiasts, and the AI enthusiasts were then mocked in return for their absurd claims about fast take-off and imminent AGI. It was a cesspool of bad takes coming from basically every angle, strengthening in certainty as they bounced off each other's idiocy. Your memory of the discourse of that era has apparently been filtered by your brain in order to support the point you want to make. Nobody who thoughtlessly adopted an extreme position at a hinge point where the future was genuinely uncertain came out of that looking particularly good.

threethirtytwo 11mo ago
Bro. You’re gonna have a hard time finding people panic posting about how they’re going to lose their jobs in a month. Literally find me one. Then show me that the majority of people posting were panicking. That is literally not what happened. You’re hallucinating. The majority of people on HN were so confident in their coding abilities that they weren’t worried at all. Just a cursory glance at the conversations back then and that is what you will see OVERALL.

bigstrat2003 11mo ago

> First AI is clearly not a stochastic parrot No it very clearly is. Even still today, it is obvious that it has zero understanding of anything and it's just parroting training data arranged in different ways.

threethirtytwo 11mo ago
No. Many of the answers it produces can only be attributed to intelligence. Not all but a many can be. We can prove that these answers are not parroted. As for “understanding” we can only infer this from input and output. We can’t actually know if it “understands” because we don’t actually know how these things work and in addition to that, we don’t have a formal definition of what “understanding” is.