Lovely article well worth attention by virtue of its regard for the cultural traits of terminology and its inflections, while also debunking the pervasive lore that "AI" devices are doing anything but the merest resemblance of thinking.

It's rare to read an author who can directly face Brandolini's Law of misinformation asymmetry and not only hold his own against the bullshit but overcome it.

What a hill to die on.

It would have been nice to see some version of “I am very surprised by how far LLMs have come since I wrote the stochastic parrots paper, here is how I have revised my thinking.” But there is nothing like that and the author is just doubling down or trying to correct perceived “misinterpretations” of her work.

Meanwhile you have multiple Fields Medalists (Tau, Gowers) saying they’re very impressed by LLMs’ mathematical reasoning, something that the stochastic parrots thesis (if it has any empirically-predictive content at all) would predict was impossible. I doubt Tau and Gowers thought much of LLMs a few years ago either. But they changed their minds. Who do you want to listen to?

I think it’s time to retire the Stochastic Parrots metaphor. A few years ago a lot of us didn’t think LLMs would ever be capable of doing what they can do now. I certainly didn’t. But new methods of training (RLVR) changed the game and took LLMs far beyond just reducing cross entropy on huge corpuses of text. And so we changed our opinions. Shame Emily Bender hasn’t too.

Sigh.

This is the first submission since a year that gives me some hope for humanity. It shows that linguistics is not obsolete. Maybe the last people capable of thinking will be linguists.

"Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind."

Modelling text describing the world is not modelling (some aspect) of the world?

Modelling the probability that a reader likes or dislike a piece of text is not modelling (some aspect) of a reader's state of mind?