[steve_adams_86]

> I'm writing this post at the time when AI is able to write code on a par with a senior developer, which is something that forces me to consider these systems to be much more sophisticated beings than mere stochastic parrots.

I can't take this seriously at this point.

When you look at a factory with sophisticated automation, it might be overwhelming to think that these mechanisms are just cold steel, plastic, rubber, simple deterministic logic, and various actuators and sensors... But that's all it is.

We can acknowledge how incredible the tools and systems are without inferring sentience. It seems to me that the people who see a spark inside, some kind of salience, are deeply confused or misled and unaware of what the underlying technology is.

Either that or they're writing stories as entertainment; I don't know. Stochastic parrot isn't quite accurate because these models don't exist in a vacuum. They're coupled with extremely robust and complex harnesses which help guide the model to explore the correct context, utilize the right functions, revise their own outputs, and so on. They are not operating solely based on the model's capabilities alone.

There's no 'there' there. It's just a tool.