Humans are not stochastic parrots. You are 100% wrong about toddlers. This was clearly explained by St. Augustine 1500 years ago:

  Did I not, then, as I grew out of infancy, come next to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me and succeed my infancy? My infancy did not go away (for where would it go?). It was simply no longer present; and I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I remember this, and I have since observed how I learned to speak. My elders did not teach me words by rote, as they taught me my letters afterward. But I myself, when I was unable to communicate all I wished to say to whomever I wished by means of whimperings and grunts and various gestures of my limbs (which I used to reinforce my demands), I myself repeated the sounds already stored in my memory by the mind which thou, O my God, hadst given me. When they called some thing by name and pointed it out while they spoke, I saw it and realized that the thing they wished to indicate was called by the name they then uttered. And what they meant was made plain by the gestures of their bodies, by a kind of natural language, common to all nations, which expresses itself through changes of countenance, glances of the eye, gestures and intonations which indicate a disposition and attitude--either to seek or to possess, to reject or to avoid. So it was that by frequently hearing words, in different phrases, I gradually identified the objects which the words stood for and, having formed my mouth to repeat these signs, I was thereby able to express my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me the verbal signs by which we express our wishes and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending all the while upon the authority of my parents and the behest of my elders.

Humans learn language opportunistically. Toddlers start with a powerful "superchimpanzee" understanding of the real world, and use that to learn words in order to satisfy their needs and desires. Statistical frequency is incidental to what words a toddler learns: what matters is the real-world context. Also note how important it is that infants instinctively understand nonverbal communication.

The most depressing thing about the 2020s AI summer is watching ignorant tech workers use the success of LLMs to launder their own ignorant misanthropy. Your views are many many centuries out of date.

> [St.Augustine quote] I remember this

I’m absolutely positive St. Augustine wasn’t some prodigious person who was able to self-introspect his early language learning and break past infant amnesia. If we’d have any means on verifying, my bet would be on that he just made this all up, post-hoc rationalizing all of that.

He can remember some sensory and pre-language mental states (desire to achieve some other state, like change of body position, or experience a taste, or a different view), but all that “whimpering and grunts and various gestures of my limbs” rationalized as purposeful communication is pure fiction. At least to my understanding, of course.

> Also note how important it is that infants instinctively understand nonverbal communication.

What does “understand” here means, and what infants exactly?

From what we know about human development, before somewhere between 2 and 9 months of age infants are unable to purposefully communicate in principle. No recipient in mind: they don’t track gaze, they don’t point at objects, they don’t share affect. Purely reflexively they can cry when they hear others crying (just like how we yawn with others), but that’s about it - just a resonance, not communication.

Obviously, comparing two different machineries suggests us they’re different (duh!) Humans aren’t LLMs, and language acquisition happens significantly different between two. But stochastic parrot is not an animal, it’s a basic principle, and that principle may possibly hold true to all life with associative learning capabilities.

FWIW nothing in this comment refutes any claims made in the comment it replies to. It's probably not the worst thing in the world for humans to start being a little more humble about themselves and their capabilities. Anthropocentrism has been a fucking disaster.

I really appreciate the effort you put in to this post. Posts like these are what makes HN great. Thank you.