[davidbalbert]

I sometimes wonder if we’re just very advanced stochastic parrots.

Repeatedly, we’ve thought that humans and animals were different in kind, only to find that we’re actually just different in degree: elephants mourn their dead, dolphins have sex for pleasure, crows make tools (even tools out of multiple non-useful parts! [1]). That could be true here.

LLMs are impressive. Nobody knows whether they will or won’t lead to AGI (if we could even agree on a definition – there’s a lot of No True Scotsman in that conversation). My uneducated guess is that that you’re probably right: just continuing to scale LLMs without other advancements won’t get us there.

But I wish we were all more humble about this. There’s been a lot of interesting emergent behavior with these systems, and we just don’t know what will happen.

[1]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-10-24-new-caledonian-crows-ca...

[airstrike]

I swear I read this exact same thread in nearly every post about OpenAI on HN. It's getting to a point where it almost feels like it's all generated by LLMs

[stackghost]

You mean the standard refrain of "we too are stochastic parrots"? Yes, that argument gets trotted out over and over.

LLM proponents seem unwilling to accept that we comprehend the words we speak/write in a way that LLMs are not capable of doing.

[airstrike]

I was referring to the whole thread, so it includes the "LLMs are nothing but stochastic parrots" bit too.

[onemoresoop]

> LLM proponents seem unwilling to accept that we comprehend the words we speak/write in a way that LLMs are not capable of doing.

Maybe their salary depends on them not understanding it.