They’re incapable of changing their mind, because they’re a Markov chain. They’re cool and they’re good at doing things, but they’re not sentient in the slightest.
(I don't think LLMs are "sentient".)
There's some haziness here about the difference between comprehensible output and comprehending. To put it mildly. I mean that's been the whole question for five or six years.
The funny thing is though, I think it’s an in group signalling mechanism. You need the anti-AI crowd to know that you’re anti-AI, and this is a rapid way of doing so, to get it upvoted here.
It's not like the "stochastic parrot" thing was the only problem here.
It is a pretty practical distinction.
So, since apparently I may need to clarify my actual point: For most people, an LLM-plus-agent-harness is just "LLM" or "AI". If you're trying to build one, you care about the distinction. Ditto if you're a pedant. But most people are not either of those things.
Go to a huggingface repo, look at the files, they have a literal chat_template.jinja
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
"a metaphor that frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without real understanding". I suppose you're defending them as having understanding. It's not "safe to say that argument has collapsed utterly", you're part of a campaign to reject the meme. On the other side, the meme is popular as a way to be rude about AI, because it's a cutting insult.
It means whatever you want it to mean, that's the best part. To me, it's best used as it was intended, but primarily in the contexts where the stochastic parrots are plowing through the ivory towers we built mostly for idiot savants.
And yet, they still output gibberish. They also still fail to solve objectively easy problems on a regular basis. That is because they are, indeed, still stochastic parrots without any actual understanding of anything or ability to reason about stuff. The argument hasn't collapsed at all.
Which?
LLMs are certainly stochastic, but they no longer meet any sane person's definition of "parrot." I can't imagine Gebru disagreeing. Has anyone bothered to ask her?
(Consider responding with an actual counterpoint, so we can all see what reasoning might give rise to such a delusion. Does your pet parrot do calculus and write stories and reverse-engineer Adobe applications?)