I Don't Want to Interact with Stochastic Parrots

71–72 of 72 posts

Re: I Don't Want to Interact with Stochastic Parrots

#71

Post by AndrewDucker » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

hardbass wrote: post #70

AndrewDucker wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it have an internal model of what a prime is? If so then it's not parroting. If it doesn't then it is. The whole point is that either they have internal models of the concepts, from experience of those things, or they don't, and are purely working from ungrounded symbols which have no connection to the actual things they're referencing. So, examples of "Look, it did this!" mean nothing to me. What matters is the…

What do you think "experience is"? The human brain and body stores experience, like anything else as physical data in itself. So why do you think an LLM can't have experiential knowledge if it is trained to or somehow naturally gains it during training?

An LLM, as the name implies, only has access to words. It can only model things about those words and the relationships between them. It never has access to the actual things the words represent.

So it absolutely has experiential knowledge of words but not of the actual things.

(You can absolutely train models on other inputs. I have no objections to those not being stochastic parrots)

Re: I Don't Want to Interact with Stochastic Parrots

#72

Post by hardbass » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

AndrewDucker wrote: post #71

hardbass wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think "experience is"? The human brain and body stores experience, like anything else as physical data in itself. So why do you think an LLM can't have experiential knowledge if it is trained to or somehow naturally gains it during training?

An LLM, as the name implies, only has access to words. It can only model things about those words and the relationships between them. It never has access to the actual things the words represent. So it absolutely has experiential knowledge of words but not of the actual things. (You can absolutely train models on other inputs. I have no objections to those not being stochastic parrots)

Yes but I meant that for instance, how is experience stored in the humans? It is encoded as data in the brain and or rest of body. So I think its possible even a pure textual LLM may have imbibed experiential data somehow during its training.

But if your claim is at least that you are fine with thinking AI's that also include physical training are not stochastic parrots, then thats good enough for me.

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