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p1dda | 3 months ago

If they're not stochastic parrots, what are they in your opinion?

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snapcaster|3 months ago

The problem is the framing. Reductionism always sounds smart and is rhetorically effective but usually just loses all nuance or meaning. I've never met a parrot (stochastic or otherwise) that could write python code or rewrite my emails so what is the point of you describing it like that besides wanting to sound smug and dismissive?

sota_pop|3 months ago

The point is that next-token prediction produces output by sampling from distributions assembled by text it has seen previously (hence stochastic). The “ding” or claim is that - like a parrot - LLMs can’t produce responses which are truly novel in concept or make logical out-of-sample leaps, only repeat from words they’ve been taught explicitly in the past.