[ninetyninenine]

What humanity has achieved here is incredible. We couldn’t even build an idiot for decades.

What you’re referring to is popular opinion. AI has become so pervasive in our lives that we are used to it and the magnitude of achievement has been lost on us. The fact that it went from stochastic parrot to idiot savant to crappy consultant is from people in denial about reality and then slowly coming to terms with it.

In the beginning literally everyone on HN called it a stochastic parrot with the authority of an expert. Clearly they were all wrong.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Oh, it's still a stochastic parrot. What changed is that people realized it didn't have the authority of an expert. What's a stochastic parrot with dubious authority? It's a crappy consultant.

[ninetyninenine]

It’s not. People in academia are not using this term anymore because it’s utterly clear it can output knowledge that doesn’t exist.

[SketchySeaBeast]

> output knowledge that doesn’t exist

So can parrots. They'll gladly generate neologisms. I'm interested in how academics define "knowledge that doesn't exist".

[ninetyninenine]

Of course parrots can output knowledge that doesn’t exist. Stochastic parrot is a different term.

> "knowledge that doesn't exist".

I said that term. So there’s no official definition but you already know that.

Basically it’s clear among everyone academics included that LLMs can rudimentarily do what humans do. That means composing knowledge and working things out to form new knowledge that doesn’t exist.

[SketchySeaBeast]

"Stochastic Parrot" implies that the thing producing the noise doesn't understand it. I'm not sure how that's currently disproven. Even acting as an agent, it is my understanding that it's just acting on it's own messages in the exact same way it'd act on one of ours.

> That means composing knowledge and working things out to form new knowledge that doesn’t exist.

That's not a terribly useful criteria, though. A Markov chain can produce novel sentences, hell a bingo machine can if you write words on the balls. "Knowledge" is kind of meaningless but also seemingly profound.

[ninetyninenine]

> That's not a terribly useful criteria, though. A Markov chain can produce novel sentences, hell a bingo machine can if you write words on the balls. "Knowledge" is kind of meaningless but also seemingly profound.

I don’t know why you came up with this pedantic example. Perhaps you’re autistic? If so then I apologize for assuming you aren’t.

Everyone knows that we are talking about more than just knowledge consisting of a random sting of letters. We are talking about actual useful knowledge.

[bee_rider]

Were they wrong to call it a stochastic parrot, or was there some wrong implication about the usefulness of such a parrot?

[daveguy]

Turns out, sometimes you want the string "polly-want-a-cracker"* in your codebase.

* where "polly-want-a-cracker" is some form of existing, common fizz-buzz-ish code.

[ninetyninenine]

The usefulness of an LLM is similar to the usefulness of a baby, but higher.

The term stochastic parrot has nothing to do with usefulness and everything to do with the existential meaning of whether this ai is repeating what it is taught or creatively forming new knowledge from logic and composition from previous knowledge.

It is categorically unequivocal that LLMs do not just parrot previous knowledge stochastically. They form new ideas from scratch.