When Timnit Gebru described LLMs as "stochastic parrots", she was making a deep point about what she believed to be the limitations of the technology. Her argument claimed that while we perceived legible text coming from ChatGPT, we were actually being fooled by our innate pattern-matching instincts. Notably, at the time she wrote this, it wasn't uncommon to see LLMs collapse into piles of gibberish, lending credence the the idea that there was never any actual meaning in the output other than what we readers brought to it.

It's safe to say that argument has collapsed utterly. Modern LLMs virtually never collapse into endless babbling loops. Far more importantly, they solve objectively hard problems. An LLM didn't merely inspire a mathematician to spot a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture that had been in front of his nose the whole time; it found the counterexample. These things are unquestionably generating meaningful outputs.

(That obviously doesn't mean that you can simply trust LLM outputs!)

At this point, trying to dunk on frontier models by calling them "stochastic parrots" is saying more about you than about the models. Moreover, it suggests you're not only out on a limb about the capabilities of LLMs, but also on what even the skeptic literature about it was saying.

You should know what "stochastic parrot" actually meant; you shouldn't be using the term just because you think it sounds snazzy.

I see them collapse when faced unusual problems. They’ll go down a weird rabbit hole and then just keep going, even if their idea is completely irrational and not working.

They’re incapable of changing their mind, because they’re a Markov chain. They’re cool and they’re good at doing things, but they’re not sentient in the slightest.

I really wish the article in question hadn’t used that phrase, because you’re right. But the rest of the article is also correct in the dangers facing us from this technology as an accelerant regardless, and I think it’s much more interesting to talk about that: but this entire comment thread will dunk on the stochastic parrot paragraphs instead.

The funny thing is though, I think it’s an in group signalling mechanism. You need the anti-AI crowd to know that you’re anti-AI, and this is a rapid way of doing so, to get it upvoted here.

An LLM did not do those things! An agentic harness around an LLM did those things.

Sherry Turkle is far more articulate on these things in her latest book Artificial Intimacy (which is about much more than the relationship chatbots)

Well, that may be what it was coined to mean, what does it mean now? Stochastic = statistical, parrot = using training data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot

"a metaphor that frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without real understanding". I suppose you're defending them as having understanding. It's not "safe to say that argument has collapsed utterly", you're part of a campaign to reject the meme. On the other side, the meme is popular as a way to be rude about AI, because it's a cutting insult.

> It's safe to say that argument has collapsed utterly. Modern LLMs virtually never collapse into endless babbling loops. Far more importantly, they solve objectively hard problems.

And yet, they still output gibberish. They also still fail to solve objectively easy problems on a regular basis. That is because they are, indeed, still stochastic parrots without any actual understanding of anything or ability to reason about stuff. The argument hasn't collapsed at all.