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Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

We had an entire portion of the hype cycle talking about or refuting the idea of stochastic Parrots.

It was short-lived if I recall, a few articles and interviews, not exactly a marketing blitz. My take-away from that was calling an LLM a "stochastic parrot" is too simplified, not that they were saying "AI us a person." Did you get that from it? I'm not advanced enough in my understanding of Gen AI to think of it as anything other than a stochastic parrot with tokenization, so I guess that part of the hype cycle fell flat?

Sorry, I'm not going to let people rewrite history here: for the first ~year after ChatGPT's release, there were tons of comments, here on HN and the wider internet, arguing that LLMs displayed signs of actual intelligence. Thankfully I don't have too many HN comments so I was able to dig up some threads where this was getting argued.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40730156

Nobody is rewriting history. I also remember the Google engineer who claimed encountering sentience, etc. What we're discussing here is dollars being put towards manipulating people into thinking the "AI" has consciousness like a person. Not whether superintelligence or AGI is possible, or maybe even closer than we think.

While the thread you link is quite the interesting read (I mean that with all sincerity, it's a subject I like to mull over and there's a lot of great opinions and speculation being displayed there) I'm not seeing any direct callouts of someone billing the current LLMs as "people," which is what the original conversation in _this_ thread was about.

There's A LOT to read there, so maybe I missed it or just have not hit it, yet. Is there specific comments I should look at?

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