There’s a lot of confusion here on what parrots exactly are capable of doing and assumptions how smart they are. I also don’t quite see what you mean by behaviour in respect to LLM’s, possibly “agentic” tool usage? Because I’m fairly certain you can explain their behaviour as “stochastic parroting” combined with very strong program, ie. harness, to interact with other systems. And perhaps this all is “some kind of intelligence”, but then you have to be very careful with what you mean by intelligence. It becomes a terribly slippery surface described like this and you see, who knows where this gradient descent takes us if we are not careful.

So personally I would still rather undersell it. But parrot or not, it is still a terribly useful little bird indeed.