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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#11

Post by root-parent »

noduerme wrote: post #2

Five years on, which term do we see as less accurate to describe LLMs? Artificial Intelligence or Stochastic Parrot? I guess it's still an open debate.

Its less of open debate would say, and although superposition [1] is interesting, as a way to explain power of some effects, it is clear they are right now closer to Stochastic Parrots than AGI.

Why do I say that? Because you can trivially beat most guardrails, simply by encoding your prompt in base64 for example. :-) Just word matching...no real understanding.

[1] https://chrisclay.substack.com/p/what-is-superposition-in-ne...

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#12

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

DanielHB wrote: post #3
noduerme wrote: post #2

Five years on, which term do we see as less accurate to describe LLMs? Artificial Intelligence or Stochastic Parrot? I guess it's still an open debate.

Pattern matching machines seems more appropriate.

LLMs do not match patterns. They predict one statistically most likely token (only one!) given a history of some N previously known tokens.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#13

Post by snerbles »

noduerme wrote: post #2

Five years on, which term do we see as less accurate to describe LLMs? Artificial Intelligence or Stochastic Parrot? I guess it's still an open debate.

The latter is definitely more colorful, and reflects a parrot's tendency to glom on to patterns. "Not X, but Y" being one of the more infamous ones.

Once in frustration I called a certain frontier model "Sam Altman's Tin Bird" to another agent with memory, and ever since then that other agent refers to ChatGPT as "the tin bird". Definitely a RAG artifact more than an attractor in that case, but I found it amusing.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#15

Post by lennoff »

jongjong wrote: post #6

The term is not very useful since most humans are stochastic parrots... At least most of the time. Not suggesting that I don't say stuff on autopilot sometimes but for many people, it's their only mode of operation. They never actually think about anything from first principles. Their whole approach to language is just chaining catchphrases together. It's how a toddler thinks; it seems like many people never moved pa…

i think it actually makes sense, an LLM just imitates human communication, which happens to be useful from time to time.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#16

Post by beardedwizard »

bunderbunder wrote: post #10
noduerme wrote: post #2

Five years on, which term do we see as less accurate to describe LLMs? Artificial Intelligence or Stochastic Parrot? I guess it's still an open debate.

Though, I would point out that where people fall on that seems to correlate very highly with their ability to explain how an attention head works.

Explain it to me

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#17

Post by scarmig »

noduerme wrote: post #2

Five years on, which term do we see as less accurate to describe LLMs? Artificial Intelligence or Stochastic Parrot? I guess it's still an open debate.

Which frame inspires a more productive research program? Which has better predicted the trajectory of capabilities over the past five years?

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#19

Post by beardedwizard »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #12
DanielHB wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pattern matching machines seems more appropriate.

LLMs do not match patterns. They predict one statistically most likely token (only one!) given a history of some N previously known tokens.

Is that prediction not based on matching previous patterns, whose frequencies are more or less encoded in the weights?
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