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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

All this, and yet, people are so angered by the term "stochastic parrot".

I use LLMs every day, I use Claude, Gemini, they're great. But they are very elaborate autocomplete engines. I'm not really shaking off that impression of them despite daily use .

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It's weird. It's literally what they are. It's a gigantic mathematical function that takes input and assigns probabilities to tokens.

Maybe they can also be smart. I'm skeptical that the current LLM approach can lead to human-level intelligence, but I'm not ruling it out. If it did, then you'd have human-level intelligence in a very elaborate autocomplete. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

People are hung up on what they “really” are. I think it matters more how the interact with the world. It doesn’t matter if they are really intelligent or not, if they act as if they are.

Totally agreed. Although the difference between sounding intelligent and being intelligent is proving to be a bit troublesome.

Yes, it is. But those distinctions are going to be a lot less relevant with robotics. It won’t matter if it’s impatient or just acting impatient. Feels slighted or just acting like it feelss slighted. Afraid, or just acting afraid. For better or for worse, we are modeling AI after ourselves.

I am hearing this term for the first time but I love it. It is novel and creates a picture. Exactly what Scott Adams says about labels used for persuasion. I usually say "highly trained autocomplete" in discussions at work, but I am going to say "stochastic parrot" from now on.

oh, OK. You should google the term to see where it comes from. it's from someone who is essentially an anti-LLM activist and it's meant as a slur. That's likely why people consider it to be a slur, due to its origins.

You can't make a "slur" against software. It isn't a person, it doesn't have feelings.

"stochastic parrot" describes what an LLM does, that it (like a parrot) generates coherent human language without understanding its meaning.

Being offended on behalf of software is weird.

> Being offended on behalf of software is weird.

Yes. I can really recommend this essay of PG about that:

https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

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