Stochastic Parrot
I worry that the &quot;stochastic parrot&quot; was premature, an idea sown early in development that will now carry along through any advances made.<p>Basically there is this innate idea that if the basic building blocks are simple systems with deterministic behavior, then the greater system can never be more than that. I&#x27;ve seen this is spades within the AI community, &quot;It&#x27;s just matrix multiplication! It&#x27;s not capable of thinking or feeling!&quot;<p>Which to me always felt more like a hopeful statement rather than a factual one. These guys have no idea what consciousness is (nobody does) nor have any reference point for what exactly is &quot;thinking&quot; or &quot;feeling&quot;. They can&#x27;t prove I&#x27;m not a stochastic parrot anymore than they can prove whatever cutting edge LLM isn&#x27;t.<p>So while yes, present LLMs likely are just stochastic parrots, the same technology scaled might bring us a model that actually is &quot;something that is something to be like&quot;, and we&#x27;ll have everyone treating it with reckless carelessness because &quot;its just a stochastic parrot&quot;.