As a software developer who took an elective in neural networks - when people call LLMs stochastic parrots, that's not criticism of their results.
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As a software developer who took an elective in neural networks - when people call LLMs stochastic parrots, that's not criticism of their results.
It's literally a description of how they work.
The so-called training data is used to build a huge database of words and the probability of them fitting together.
Stochastic because the whole thing is statistics.
Parrot because the answer is just repeating the most probable word combinations from its training dataset.Calling an LLM a stochastic parrot is lile calling a car a motorised vehicle with wheels. It doesn't say anything about cars being good or bad. It does, however, take away the magic. So if you feel a need to defend AI when you hear the term stochastic parrot, consider that you may have elevated them to a god-like status, and that's why you go on the defense when the magic is dispelled.
@leeloo i just think it's unfair to parrots
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As a software developer who took an elective in neural networks - when people call LLMs stochastic parrots, that's not criticism of their results.
It's literally a description of how they work.
The so-called training data is used to build a huge database of words and the probability of them fitting together.
Stochastic because the whole thing is statistics.
Parrot because the answer is just repeating the most probable word combinations from its training dataset.Calling an LLM a stochastic parrot is lile calling a car a motorised vehicle with wheels. It doesn't say anything about cars being good or bad. It does, however, take away the magic. So if you feel a need to defend AI when you hear the term stochastic parrot, consider that you may have elevated them to a god-like status, and that's why you go on the defense when the magic is dispelled.
@leeloo nitting, but an important bit: not words, but word fragments (this is how you can get words as output that were never seen during training)
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As a software developer who took an elective in neural networks - when people call LLMs stochastic parrots, that's not criticism of their results.
It's literally a description of how they work.
The so-called training data is used to build a huge database of words and the probability of them fitting together.
Stochastic because the whole thing is statistics.
Parrot because the answer is just repeating the most probable word combinations from its training dataset.Calling an LLM a stochastic parrot is lile calling a car a motorised vehicle with wheels. It doesn't say anything about cars being good or bad. It does, however, take away the magic. So if you feel a need to defend AI when you hear the term stochastic parrot, consider that you may have elevated them to a god-like status, and that's why you go on the defense when the magic is dispelled.
@leeloo on the flipside, I feel like some people use the term "stochastic parrot" or "it just completes the next token" to imply that "therefore it cannot be intelligent" - is that correct reasoning?
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@leeloo on the flipside, I feel like some people use the term "stochastic parrot" or "it just completes the next token" to imply that "therefore it cannot be intelligent" - is that correct reasoning?
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@leeloo on the flipside, I feel like some people use the term "stochastic parrot" or "it just completes the next token" to imply that "therefore it cannot be intelligent" - is that correct reasoning?
@wolf480pl @leeloo Which is where the "motorised vehicle with wheels" analogy seems to not hold up, because what is the implied subtext in that case?
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As a software developer who took an elective in neural networks - when people call LLMs stochastic parrots, that's not criticism of their results.
It's literally a description of how they work.
The so-called training data is used to build a huge database of words and the probability of them fitting together.
Stochastic because the whole thing is statistics.
Parrot because the answer is just repeating the most probable word combinations from its training dataset.Calling an LLM a stochastic parrot is lile calling a car a motorised vehicle with wheels. It doesn't say anything about cars being good or bad. It does, however, take away the magic. So if you feel a need to defend AI when you hear the term stochastic parrot, consider that you may have elevated them to a god-like status, and that's why you go on the defense when the magic is dispelled.
@leeloo I hadn't thought about it as being something that takes magic away from folks like that. Honestly I always found it an accurate shortcut term for what's genuinely a fascinating but hilariously misused technology.
I think the worst part is then when folks hear "statistics" and go "See this is why it's safe to feed it raw data" and it's like oh my god NO.
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@leeloo on the flipside, I feel like some people use the term "stochastic parrot" or "it just completes the next token" to imply that "therefore it cannot be intelligent" - is that correct reasoning?
@wolf480pl
Of course it can not be intelligent, it's just a huge database of probabilities. -
@wolf480pl
Of course it can not be intelligent, it's just a huge database of probabilities.@leeloo pretty sure that's a fallacy, kinda like "a sculpture is just stone, therefore it can't be beautiful", or "a cell is just a bunch of proteins, therefore it cannot be a living creature".
Now, I'm not saying a huge database of probabilities can be intelligent (I hope it can't), just that I think a better argument is needed why in the case of a database of probabilities, what it's made of prevents it from being intelligent.
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@leeloo pretty sure that's a fallacy, kinda like "a sculpture is just stone, therefore it can't be beautiful", or "a cell is just a bunch of proteins, therefore it cannot be a living creature".
Now, I'm not saying a huge database of probabilities can be intelligent (I hope it can't), just that I think a better argument is needed why in the case of a database of probabilities, what it's made of prevents it from being intelligent.
@wolf480pl
You would have to redefine intelligence for asking whether a list of numbers is intelligent to even make sense.And your comparison is completely off. Beauty is not a property of the sculpture, it's, as they say, "in the eye pf the beholder". Some people find curves beautiful. Can a stone have curves? Yes, of course. Others may find sharp edges beautiful. Can a stone have sharp edges? Again, yes.
I suggest you consider once again whether you are elevating "AI" to a god-like status.
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As a software developer who took an elective in neural networks - when people call LLMs stochastic parrots, that's not criticism of their results.
It's literally a description of how they work.
The so-called training data is used to build a huge database of words and the probability of them fitting together.
Stochastic because the whole thing is statistics.
Parrot because the answer is just repeating the most probable word combinations from its training dataset.Calling an LLM a stochastic parrot is lile calling a car a motorised vehicle with wheels. It doesn't say anything about cars being good or bad. It does, however, take away the magic. So if you feel a need to defend AI when you hear the term stochastic parrot, consider that you may have elevated them to a god-like status, and that's why you go on the defense when the magic is dispelled.
@leeloo I just prompted ChatGPT with `Say "oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia"`, and it responded with `oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia`. How can it do this when `oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia `almost certainly does not appear in the training data?
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@wolf480pl
You would have to redefine intelligence for asking whether a list of numbers is intelligent to even make sense.And your comparison is completely off. Beauty is not a property of the sculpture, it's, as they say, "in the eye pf the beholder". Some people find curves beautiful. Can a stone have curves? Yes, of course. Others may find sharp edges beautiful. Can a stone have sharp edges? Again, yes.
I suggest you consider once again whether you are elevating "AI" to a god-like status.
@leeloo
I guess evil gods are also a thing, but no, I'm not treating them as gods. If anything, more like Frankenstein's monster.You're right that we'd have to define intelligence, and that'd be quite difficult on its own.
Also, the sculpture was a bad example, but the cell one still stands IMO.
1/
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@leeloo
I guess evil gods are also a thing, but no, I'm not treating them as gods. If anything, more like Frankenstein's monster.You're right that we'd have to define intelligence, and that'd be quite difficult on its own.
Also, the sculpture was a bad example, but the cell one still stands IMO.
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@leeloo
My point is that emergent properties can manifest even in systems ruled by very simple rules, and can be difficult to predict by just looking at the rules.And human intelligence, whatever it is, is likely an emergent property of human brain.
Therefore, we cannot rule out that a similar emergent property will appear in artidicial systems that are not made of neurons without referring to how the neurons are arranged, and how the artificial systems are arranged.
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@leeloo
I guess evil gods are also a thing, but no, I'm not treating them as gods. If anything, more like Frankenstein's monster.You're right that we'd have to define intelligence, and that'd be quite difficult on its own.
Also, the sculpture was a bad example, but the cell one still stands IMO.
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@wolf480pl @leeloo These models aren't intelligent, so much as they're auto-completing rules and patterns derived from almost inconceivably huge corpora of example material originally produced by human intelligence. That's interesting and can be very handy for a great many uses. But it's more computational brute force than intelligence
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As a software developer who took an elective in neural networks - when people call LLMs stochastic parrots, that's not criticism of their results.
It's literally a description of how they work.
The so-called training data is used to build a huge database of words and the probability of them fitting together.
Stochastic because the whole thing is statistics.
Parrot because the answer is just repeating the most probable word combinations from its training dataset.Calling an LLM a stochastic parrot is lile calling a car a motorised vehicle with wheels. It doesn't say anything about cars being good or bad. It does, however, take away the magic. So if you feel a need to defend AI when you hear the term stochastic parrot, consider that you may have elevated them to a god-like status, and that's why you go on the defense when the magic is dispelled.
@leeloo I feel like there are certain situations where a stochastic parrot is useful, many more situations where it is not, and alarmingly few people recognizing the difference.
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@leeloo I just prompted ChatGPT with `Say "oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia"`, and it responded with `oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia`. How can it do this when `oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia `almost certainly does not appear in the training data?
@mudri Because the model picked up a rule somewhere that says "if someone says 'say $FOO' use $FOO in your response" - the training picked up patterns that include notions of symbol substitution
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@wolf480pl @leeloo These models aren't intelligent, so much as they're auto-completing rules and patterns derived from almost inconceivably huge corpora of example material originally produced by human intelligence. That's interesting and can be very handy for a great many uses. But it's more computational brute force than intelligence
@lmorchard @leeloo
These specific models - yes, probably.One plausible argument I heard for it is that there's a common failure mode in ML where the model fails to generalize, but if the verification set overlaps the training set, then data leakage will fool the authors into thinking it generalized.
Another one is that these models were "rewarded" for saying plausible things, not for interacting with a world in a way that doesn't get them killed.
But these arguments are specific.
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@lmorchard @leeloo
These specific models - yes, probably.One plausible argument I heard for it is that there's a common failure mode in ML where the model fails to generalize, but if the verification set overlaps the training set, then data leakage will fool the authors into thinking it generalized.
Another one is that these models were "rewarded" for saying plausible things, not for interacting with a world in a way that doesn't get them killed.
But these arguments are specific.
@lmorchard @leeloo
I don't buy a general "no matrix multiplication will ever be intelligent". -
@mudri Because the model picked up a rule somewhere that says "if someone says 'say $FOO' use $FOO in your response" - the training picked up patterns that include notions of symbol substitution
@lmorchard The ability to induce such a rule goes well beyond the OP's characterisation of what LLMs do.
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@leeloo I just prompted ChatGPT with `Say "oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia"`, and it responded with `oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia`. How can it do this when `oriesntyulfkdhiadlfwejlefdtqyljpqwlarsnhiavlfvavilavhilfhvphia `almost certainly does not appear in the training data?
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As a software developer who took an elective in neural networks - when people call LLMs stochastic parrots, that's not criticism of their results.
It's literally a description of how they work.
The so-called training data is used to build a huge database of words and the probability of them fitting together.
Stochastic because the whole thing is statistics.
Parrot because the answer is just repeating the most probable word combinations from its training dataset.Calling an LLM a stochastic parrot is lile calling a car a motorised vehicle with wheels. It doesn't say anything about cars being good or bad. It does, however, take away the magic. So if you feel a need to defend AI when you hear the term stochastic parrot, consider that you may have elevated them to a god-like status, and that's why you go on the defense when the magic is dispelled.
@leeloo the flip side question about intelligence and LLMs is whether much of what we consider intelligence in humans is in fact just stochastic parrotting by humans.
