[jbay808]

I just can't imagine how a stochastic parrot could repeat back a correctly-sorted list that it hasn't seen in training, without actually implementing a sorting algorithm in the process. It seems (and, by calculation, is) phenomenally unlikely that it would just stochastically happen to pick every single number correctly.

When that is combined with the fact that transformers provably can implement proper deterministic sorting algorithms, it seems that the benefit of the doubt should go to the transformer having learned a sorting algorithm?

LLMs aren't plastic in the sense that they don't learn anything when they aren't being trained. But they can be trained to execute different programs depending on the contents of the context window, like if it contains "wrong, try again:" so maybe they can learn from their mistakes in that sense.

But if you could teach an LLM to sort by explaining it in the context window, the network would already have necessarily learned and stored a sorting algorithm somewhere; the text "here is how sorting is done: [...]" would just be serving as the trigger for that function call.

[eximius]

Again, I think the disagreement is not whether it has learned to approximate a sorting algorithm, but whether that qualifies as reasoning and, if it does, in what sense.

[jbay808]

I won't take a hard stance on what counts as "reasoning", which I picked in the title for lack of a better summarizing word; I am open to alternatives. So if you think that making abstractions and implementing a sorting algorithm does not count as reasoning, I will not disagree with that position. Where I am going to take a hard stance is on what does a stochastic parrot cannot do. And a stochastic parrot, defined as "stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning", cannot sort lists of 127 characters.

[hnfong]

Given that so often the people claiming GPT4 is a stochastic parrot don't understand what stochastic parrots are, it can be said that they are the stochastic parrots themselves.