I've come to understand that while an LLM is a parrot, it's a parrot that's smarter than I am.

If you have to be a parrot of another man's thoughts, at least let that man be a synthesis of all human endeavor to date.

Smarter in some ways at least. Probably still not quite as smart at understanding human emotions (and things that aren't well enough catalogued on the internet or amenable to Reinforcement Learning on virtual environments).

Perhaps we are all parrots.

At least you recognize this. The average Redditor is not capable of such self-examination.

Highly relevant comment <https://np.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1jh9c90/why_do_...>:

>Imagine you had a frozen [large language] model that is a 1:1 copy of the average person, let’s say, an average Redditor. Literally nobody would use that model because it can’t do anything. It can’t code, can’t do math, isn’t particularly creative at writing stories. It generalizes when it’s wrong and has biases that not even fine-tuning with facts can eliminate. And it hallucinates like crazy often stating opinions as facts, or thinking it is correct when it isn't.

>The only things it can do are basic tasks nobody needs a model for, because everyone can already do them. If you are lucky you get one that is pretty good in a singular narrow task. But that's the best it can get.

>and somehow this model won't shut up and tell everyone how smart and special it is also it claims consciousness. ridiculous.

Hot take: even GPT-3 was not a parrot. Skeptics have never properly internalized that the fundamental operation is basically irrelevant to the gestalt. Humans are not parrots yet neurons likely also largely operate via predictive processing.