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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#191

Post by dwa3592 »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #182
dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

The contention that there is no grounding because the training data is linguistic and thus can only reference a world model is disproven in "This sentence has five words"- there's real, grounded information about what "five" means within that sentence. While that's a trivial counterexample, I don't know that it's an obvious one (I didn't come up with it myself). It's not a criticism of the paper itself, but multimoda…

>>The contention that there is no grounding because the training data is linguistic and thus can only reference a world model is disproven in "This sentence has five words"- there's real, grounded information about what "five" means within that sentence.

did you think this through?

imagine the sentence was "This sentence has four words", now extrapolate that to all the shit that can exist in a dataset and train a model on that dataset - do you know what will happen? - go ahead and think it through.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#192

Post by jimmygrapes »

scarmig wrote: post #117
NeutralCrane wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous

The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

I prefer to use the hospital analogy. Locally, the water concerns are a big deal but a lot of people in my community are riled up about the potential need for diesel backup generators because of the noise pollution. They are not wrong and it's good to consider, but they are at this point grasping for reasons that would not (and have not) been concerns for other large footprint projects like hospitals with similar infrastructure needs.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#193

Post by dwa3592 »

daishi55 wrote: post #171
dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

My criticism centers on the part of the paper they chose for their title, the “stochastic parrot” metaphor. And my criticism is that if you observe Claude code with opus 4.8 working through an entirely novel problem that nobody has ever worked on before and which certainly wasn’t in its training data, the choice to even metaphorically call them stochastic parrots turned out to be egregiously wrong. And secondarily, a…

oh boy! the lack of critical thinking here is staggering.

>>And my criticism is that if you observe Claude code with opus 4.8 working through an entirely novel problem that nobody has ever worked on before and which certainly wasn’t in its training data, the choice to even metaphorically call them stochastic parrots turned out to be egregiously wrong.

First of all, for your own benefit - Claude code stopped showing the real reasoning. It only shows a summarized version of it now. So don't ever ask someone to observe the model. Second, do you know when this paper came out? do you know when opus 4.8 came out??? how do you know what is novel? did opus 4.8 tell you it was novel? how do you know no one has worked on it before?

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#194

Post by thechao »

throwaway7356 wrote: post #174
Diogenesian wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My source is "none of us have ever seen a robot that can navigate unfamiliar 3D spaces as well as a cockroach." If transformers were capable of the job we would have seen a smart robot by now. But all of our robots are truly mindless compared to the simplest insects. I will change my mind if someone demonstrates such a robot. Absent this demonstration, cockroach-level AI is still an unsolved problem. Given how ignora…

Then one can claim that humans are less intelligent than a goldfish as "none of us have ever seen a human swim as well as a goldfish".

It's around hour 20 of trying to breath that I start to really think the Goldfish has an edge on me.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#195

Post by [deleted] »

mike_hearn wrote: post #188
dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

The authors were wrong about their core thesis and are now lying about it. That's the only criticism needed. They said, quote: > LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form ... which is presented as unarguable fact, yet is untrue. It was obviously wrong at the time it was written and it's been proven wrong in many w…

[deleted]

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#196

Post by thx67 »

simonw wrote: post #185
thx67 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know this doesn't suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia? The first version had so many glaring errors that have been "corrected" (removed), and I don't have the energy to comb through this one. I am highly skeptical of layperson debunking like this.

Andy has a good track record for writing about this. He shares plenty of credible citations - more so than most other people commenting in this space. He also caught a major error in one of the most widely read books that helped kick off the whole data center water debate: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

The thing that is off putting about how he uses rhetoric is that it feels like and-you deflection (tu quoque).

> Claim that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city of 88,000 people, where it’s actually using about 0.22x as much water as the city, and only 3% of the municipal water system the city relies on. She’s off by a factor of 4500. This is the single largest error in any popular book that I’ve found on my own, and to my knowledge I’m the first person to notice it.

Yeah, she might be wrong. But a data center also using 1/5th of the water consumption of an 88k person city should still be what are debating. We also have a base rate fallacy, we don't know know how well or how poorly they are using water. Nearly all criticisms of AI data center criticisms boil (no pun intended) down to yeah, but what about almonds or rice or xyz. That isn't a healthy way to adjust how we talk about data center water consumption.

It is a classic debate tactic. Someone makes an argument, then buttresses that argument with a number. You attack the number, pretending that you didn't just correct the number, but also invalidate the original argument. We shouldn't be using these tactics to talk about the tragedy of the commons.

I worked for a hyperscaler, I poked around a bit about water usage both internally and externally and it wasn't good. There was little to no thought other than, "we can pay X to have water delivered, doesn't matter if it sourced responsibly." (to glibly paraphrase, company policy is to never write the honest part down)

Look at how hard Google fought to not have water data released in The Dalles Oregon for their DC there. Many DCs are supplied by water that is meant for humans, sourced from aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to fill, that are being depleted faster than they are filled, already.

I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#197

Post by nyeah »

mike_hearn wrote: post #188
dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

The authors were wrong about their core thesis and are now lying about it. That's the only criticism needed. They said, quote: > LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form ... which is presented as unarguable fact, yet is untrue. It was obviously wrong at the time it was written and it's been proven wrong in many w…

No, they were correct. In fact an LLM stitches together stuff it observed in its training data. That scales up way better than a lot of us expected, but it's still correct.

If you train it on lots of working code, then it's useful for coding. If you trained it primarily on non-working code it would produce nonsense.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#198

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

27183 wrote: post #126
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not offended by the line of questioning! But I don't really follow it. I don't and IIUC Bender doesn't use "understanding" to refer to any kind of magical property. Understanding is the capability of using words as consistent handles to things in the exterior world which the language is describing. And this is something LLMs can clearly do. I just went to ChatGPT and asked this question, which is almost surely no…

> And this is something LLMs can clearly do. ... > It knew that this is a dangerous thing I should not do in real life From the ChatGPT response you linked, all I see for sure is some matches on the following patterns: drop $thing from skyscraper --> bad behavior drop $thing --> physics can of $stuff --> contents in/out of can Then there are some sentences of likely characters following those patterns. You don't need…

I'll have to think more about this. Your last point feels somewhat persuasive to me, I'm at least a lot less confident in this than I was.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#199

Post by dwa3592 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #188
dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

The authors were wrong about their core thesis and are now lying about it. That's the only criticism needed. They said, quote: > LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form ... which is presented as unarguable fact, yet is untrue. It was obviously wrong at the time it was written and it's been proven wrong in many w…

I read your comment multiple times and sorry to say none of your criticisms make any logical sense in any shape or form whatsoever.

>> > LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form

did you read the paper carefully??? this line is directly cited from another paper (pay attention - it's from july 2020) . the full line is - LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form [ 14 ]

the paper its cited from is titled - Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data

>>>She did say that, as clear as day. Now she's trying to rewrite history. Ugly behavior.

did you read the article after that line or was there a shortage of attention span??

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#200

Post by simonw »

thx67 wrote: post #196
simonw wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andy has a good track record for writing about this. He shares plenty of credible citations - more so than most other people commenting in this space. He also caught a major error in one of the most widely read books that helped kick off the whole data center water debate: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

The thing that is off putting about how he uses rhetoric is that it feels like and-you deflection (tu quoque). > Claim that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city of 88,000 people, where it’s actually using about 0.22x as much water as the city, and only 3% of the municipal water system the city relies on. She’s off by a factor of 4500. This is the single largest error in any popular book that I’ve foun…

> I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.

I really don't think we are. In the wider culture the idea that data centers use an absurd amount of water is baked in at this point.

It frustrates me because I think it distracts from energy usage, which is a much more real issue than water usage.

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