A Camera, Not an Engine
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studio.ribbonfarm.com
I do hope people realize that the "stochastic parrots" thing is not a "take" but a 14 page research paper by four qualified authors, with a 158 item references section.
In all seriousness, that take was polemic and arguably bad-faith when it was published; and it is much more egregiously so now.
The good news is we're going to hear much, much less about "stochastic parrots" when multi-modal models come into their own. The "faked" Gemini video may have been faked but it won't be fake for particularly long, that should be obvious to anyone in or closely following the field.
The premise that human beings do something substantially different from correlate multilevel abstractions is looking pretty weak.
If one prefers to take the other side as primary and start arguing that what they mean by parrots applies about as much to humans, well, then we can start using that language.
Otherwise it's poppycock.
A whale "is" a mammal, as "is" a mouse. But a whale is not "equal to" a mouse.
> by four qualified authors
What is the (comprehensive) meaning of this symbol: "qualified"?
Why the obtuse questioning? You can look up the authors and their qualifications are plain to see. Look, here's the first author, you can see for yourself.
Why the dodging of the question? Might you be leveraging culture? At your day job do you use this same technique against computers, shaming compile errors into compliance with your desires?
You seem like an more intelligent than average human, why not demonstrate it rather than merely imply it? No need to constrain yourself to cultural norms of politeness and meme magic, feel free to blow my doors off.
I asked a pointed question - do you have the ability to answer it? Or even better: do you have the ability to even try, in public? Internet forum discussions are serious business, so I can appreciate both aversion, and silence[1].
>> What is the (comprehensive) meaning of this symbol: "qualified"?
Do you know the(?) answer to this question?
Noteworthy: you are in no way obligated to answer to me, though there may be causal ramifications of you are unable to.
Oh my, look at all the culturally unusual fodder I have provided for you to leverage cultural norms against! I did my best to make it irresistible.
Have you any more memes for the class, intelligent Western human? I am here to learn, and learn from you I intend to do.
[1] Here is an excellent opportunity to proclaim (sincerely!) confusion due to a non-normative usage of language and dismiss me as crazy/etc. Not that it's necessary in the first place - we are on your, and Dang's, and YCombinator's turf - you can literally declare victory at any time, and win! Do you know why this is?
META: dang, if I was you I would would reduce the allowable time limit for edits, at least on a per user basis as you (your company) has done with posts. As reality becomes more complex, it is rational to increase your (platform's) ability to distort it - to me, this is fair game play...though one wouldn't want to reveal it is a game, of course. Just an idea.
I am refusing to accept your framing (being that we should discuss qualification in detail) as I suspect you do not call in to question the qualifications of the authors (or the meaning of the word qualifications) when an AI paper being discussed has been written by men, rather than women.
>>> What is the (comprehensive) meaning of this symbol: "qualified"? > Do you know the(?) answer to this question?
Comprehensive meaning? Nope. But I don't accept that I must be able to comprehensively articulate the meaning of every word I use. I accept that the authors of the paper have enough education and experience to write a paper on this subject that is worth examination.
The biggest reason I dismissed you originally is that your style of conversation is coming off to me more argumentative than anything else, and it is my experience that arguing with people on the internet is a waste of time. Plenty of people on this site treat others with respect, and reasonable people can disagree about a great many things, and so I am willing to explain my reasoning to them in detail. But when someone comes in with what seems like an argumentative state of mind, I either ignore them or make a comment that purposefully ignores their framing of the question, knowing that is a trap.
> Oh my, look at all the culturally unusual fodder I have provided for you to leverage cultural norms against! I did my best to make it irresistible.
This is a great example of argumentative style that I personally will just ignore.
> we are on your, and Dang's, and YCombinator's turf - you can literally declare victory at any time, and win!
More evidence, in my opinion, that you are viewing this not as a respectful conversation between reasonable people, but some weird kind of internet battle field. I literally don't give a shit about winning, so your assumptions about my motivations are flawed and this explains why you find my response confusing.
Did I claim that you are obligated to?
You certainly don't need to be able to. Worse, you may not even be able to see the benefit of a species using language that is highly and consistently understandable (as is common in science, engineering, law, etc).
Let's hope there aren't any negative consequences from this ideology, which seems to be a cultural norms, supported by the vast majority of people across most any ideology ("pendants" being an exception - for fun, look up the meaning of that word in the dictionary).
Say, what's your stance on climate change, and the various wars The Humans have going on?
Did you spend any time/compute in the massive hyperlinked space underlying this part?
1. Whatever the hell Leibniz was thinking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_ratiocinator
a) If so, how confident are you that you understood it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
b) If you did not, why did you not?
c) Do you know what Leibniz was talking about? Because it may be a good question. (Or, it may not be.)
> This kind of seems like...
Speaking of philosophy: have you any interest in what it is?
> where people confuse
People are indeed silly. One problem with silliness is, it tends to render the patient unable to accurately self-diagnose.