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Comment by p1dda | Hacker News Reader

If they're not stochastic parrots, what are they in your opinion?

The problem is the framing. Reductionism always sounds smart and is rhetorically effective but usually just loses all nuance or meaning. I've never met a parrot (stochastic or otherwise) that could write python code or rewrite my emails so what is the point of you describing it like that besides wanting to sound smug and dismissive?

The point is that next-token prediction produces output by sampling from distributions assembled by text it has seen previously (hence stochastic). The “ding” or claim is that - like a parrot - LLMs can’t produce responses which are truly novel in concept or make logical out-of-sample leaps, only repeat from words they’ve been taught explicitly in the past.

So you think stochastic parrot is an accurate term and not an attempt to be dismissive? So if someone woke up from a coma and asked what ChatGPT is you would say "stochastic parrot" and think you've explained things?

While “stochastic parrot” is obviously an over-simplification, and the way the phrase was originally coined in context was likewise obviously intended to be dismissive, I think the analogy holds. I see them as a lossy storage system.

I think the expectation that simply continuing to scale the transformer architecture is not likely to exhibit the type of “intelligence” for which _researchers_ are looking.

For my personal taste, the most interesting development of NLP in this latest AI wave (and LLMs in general) is RAG. I also have always wondered why the tokenization process hasn’t been deemed more important historically. To me, it seems like THE MOST critical part of how Deep Learning works.

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