Fascinating! It's the other way around for me. Most of the tech people I talk about it with dismiss it as a stochastic parrot and very much don't trust it, and it's the non-tech people that rave about their new friend that knows and will explain everything.
Stochastic Parrot - a name that aged like milk. How can it be a parrot when it is doing few-shot and zero-shot tasks? Humans also make mistakes, and we're also using leaky abstractions to operate.
We're "parroting" things we don't really understand. When we take a pill, we don't know what's inside. When we go to the doctor, we don't study medicine first. When we write an app, we don't know the minute details of the operating system or frameworks we use. As software developers we know the limits of abstraction and that no abstraction works everywhere.
Our society is functional, not based on genuine understanding. Can't be any other way. There is no central understanding, not in the brain and not in society. Remember the parable of the Elephant and the blind men? That's us.
Well there's one difference right there. When I sell my software I provide a warrantee and will refund if the software is not substantially functional, as described in the documentation and marketing.
A couple of consulting jobs have also required that I carry insurance to cover possible restitution due to errors and omissions - because yes, I do make mistakes.
As I understand it, the stochastic parrot providers require indemnification before you can use their products, so they are clearly held to a lower standard than humans.
Yeah. Every time Nvidia or OpenAI come up, and some one asks "where's their moat?" I giggle because that just makes me more convinced it's humans that are stochastic parrots, more than LLMs don't have something resembling intelligence. intelligent.
