What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

7/6/2026 at 3:31:07 PM

> in part because Google fired two of the authors, Timnit Gebru

I remember being angry about this situation when I first saw it on social media, until I read the details: This person submitted a list of demands to her employer and said that if they weren’t met, she quit. Google wasn’t going to meet her demands so they considered it acceptance of her resignation. There has been a movement trying to debate whether it was a firing or resignation ever since.

The original paper they published gets recirculated every year or two as some landmark history of AI safety, but as other commenters have noted it wasn’t really a great paper nor was it groundbreaking at the time. If not for the controversy surrounding the resignation/firing (depending on your POV), I don’t think it would have been notable.

by Aurornis

7/6/2026 at 3:52:21 PM

I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the story broke. I remember there were a large number of Memegen posts about it, but no one I spoke with knew about her, so I assumed it was brigading.

I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x

by arthurjj

7/6/2026 at 4:35:40 PM

What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous

by NeutralCrane

7/6/2026 at 5:27:25 PM

I like this summary https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fak...

And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173

by arthurjj

7/6/2026 at 4:48:02 PM

The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

by scarmig

7/6/2026 at 8:18:28 PM

I prefer to use the hospital analogy. Locally, the water concerns are a big deal but a lot of people in my community are riled up about the potential need for diesel backup generators because of the noise pollution. They are not wrong and it's good to consider, but they are at this point grasping for reasons that would not (and have not) been concerns for other large footprint projects like hospitals with similar infrastructure needs.

by jimmygrapes

7/6/2026 at 9:18:19 PM

And you don't understand why what's tolerated of a hospital may not be tolerated of other kinds of buildings?

by fluoridation

7/6/2026 at 4:54:38 PM

Or even better: the footprint of doing something like farming corn for ethanol

by QuercusMax

7/6/2026 at 5:10:34 PM

Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable.

See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them!

They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes.

The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped.

I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”

by agentultra

7/6/2026 at 5:19:48 PM

Putting things into perspective is not minimising the problem. We literally have to do this to prioritise where our efforts can be useful.

Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense.

Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for

by rdedev

7/6/2026 at 6:28:29 PM

I am guessing (not asserting) that there is a sort of cap on water used for agriculture. It's possible we've already reached it. (?)

So, on the matter of scale: there likely isn't a cap on water use of these datacenters. Both the heat emission and usage levels for these systems will likely go up unless there is a fundamental technical breakthrough.

On the matter of utility: As a sibling of GP mentioned, the utility of food is clear.

On the matter of polution: I am not remotely read on waste water and contamination due to industrial agriculture. Is this also something where the judgmental scale is tipped in favor of food production vs cooling systems?

by yubblegum

7/6/2026 at 9:16:36 PM

what is the utility of alfaalfa? Because as it stands it's essentially just a way to export enormous amounts of water from a place where there's little (California) to a place where there's none (the Arabian peninsula).

This is bullshit to be charitable.

by luckydata

7/6/2026 at 9:15:11 PM

some might call it "perspective"

by luckydata

7/6/2026 at 5:24:09 PM

Nice false dichotomy you got there there, might as well calculate the entire water usage for a a single GPU in the supply chain too. Something tells me one is extremely worse than the other when you account for all the water that's used in a single supply chain for high end electronics, but if you want to plop the measuring stick where ever along the whole pony show that makes you look better people will notice.

Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices.

This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.

by shimman

7/6/2026 at 8:11:00 PM

let's compare ai water usage with something even more useless, water leaking out of pipes. the United States currently loses about 2 trillion gallons of water annually to leaking pipes. this is in comparison to around 230 billion gallons used by data centers.

we're literally dumping several times the amount of water used by data centers onto the ground for no benefit at all. oddly enough I haven't seen any protests about this despite how concerned everyone is about water usage.

by jayGlow

7/6/2026 at 9:27:57 PM

It's because spilling water doesn't do anything: water evaporates, becomes cloud, rains down etc.

Meanwhile, datacenters sacrifice water by sending it to Mars in order to compute criminal deepfakes of innocent politicians.

by gordian-mind

7/6/2026 at 5:20:20 PM

This is a useful piece on that: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

by simonw

7/6/2026 at 6:55:26 PM

How do you know this doesn't suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia? The first version had so many glaring errors that have been "corrected" (removed), and I don't have the energy to comb through this one.

I am highly skeptical of layperson debunking like this.

by thx67

7/6/2026 at 7:50:22 PM

Andy has a good track record for writing about this. He shares plenty of credible citations - more so than most other people commenting in this space.

He also caught a major error in one of the most widely read books that helped kick off the whole data center water debate: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

by simonw

7/6/2026 at 8:40:57 PM

The thing that is off putting about how he uses rhetoric is that it feels like and-you deflection (tu quoque).

> Claim that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city of 88,000 people, where it’s actually using about 0.22x as much water as the city, and only 3% of the municipal water system the city relies on. She’s off by a factor of 4500. This is the single largest error in any popular book that I’ve found on my own, and to my knowledge I’m the first person to notice it.

Yeah, she might be wrong. But a data center also using 1/5th of the water consumption of an 88k person city should still be what are debating. We also have a base rate fallacy, we don't know know how well or how poorly they are using water. Nearly all criticisms of AI data center criticisms boil (no pun intended) down to yeah, but what about almonds or rice or xyz. That isn't a healthy way to adjust how we talk about data center water consumption.

It is a classic debate tactic. Someone makes an argument, then buttresses that argument with a number. You attack the number, pretending that you didn't just correct the number, but also invalidate the original argument. We shouldn't be using these tactics to talk about the tragedy of the commons.

I worked for a hyperscaler, I poked around a bit about water usage both internally and externally and it wasn't good. There was little to no thought other than, "we can pay X to have water delivered, doesn't matter if it sourced responsibly." (to glibly paraphrase, company policy is to never write the honest part down)

Look at how hard Google fought to not have water data released in The Dalles Oregon for their DC there. Many DCs are supplied by water that is meant for humans, sourced from aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to fill, that are being depleted faster than they are filled, already.

I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.

by thx67

7/6/2026 at 9:14:23 PM

> I think AI is powerful tool, but we still can't give DC expansion a pass.

I really don't think we are. In the wider culture the idea that data centers use an absurd amount of water is baked in at this point.

It frustrates me because I think it distracts from energy usage, which is a much more real issue than water usage.

by simonw

7/6/2026 at 8:09:35 PM

in my agi doomer opinion the water argument is akin to a concern that dropping a nuke may endanger certain rare species in the area

by lukewarm707

7/6/2026 at 5:39:01 PM

What is interesting about it for me is: why would someone working on AI ethics choose to work for Google at all?

Did she really think Google cares about ethics? Such positions seem purely performative, we all know that ethics go out the window first to make room for more profits.

by sureglymop

7/6/2026 at 5:15:27 PM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25324263

She was well known to be toxic and extremely exploitive of victim privilege

by breppp

7/6/2026 at 5:32:46 PM

I missed that thread when it came out, it's really a wild read. The difference between how people describe her vs how she's normally portrayed in the media is really startling

by arthurjj

7/6/2026 at 6:03:55 PM

People generally get fed the stories they already believe to be true

So that's why "Brave minority woman unfairly fired by evil AI corporation" sells better than "Self-entitled minority woman is terrible bully to colleagues"

by breppp

7/6/2026 at 3:46:41 PM

True but also... she wasn't a software engineer putting code in production nor a researcher working no the fundamentals of machine learning negotiating a raise.

She was part of the "Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team" of what was then, and still is now, one of the corporations World wide spending the largest amount of resources precisely on using AI commercially.

by utopiah

7/6/2026 at 4:17:20 PM

I'm saying the paper itself wasn't a bombshell or even that noteworthy. The reason it got PR and continues to come up was because the authors manufactured this self-inflicted drama around it, not because it was leaking secret revelations that harmed the company.

by Aurornis

7/6/2026 at 7:04:07 PM

Never underestimate the power of a catchy title that resonates with the intuitions and preconceptions of people who will never read the paper.

Cf. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...

by marshray

7/6/2026 at 6:42:01 PM

Timnit got popular because she was part of Woke 1.

by simianwords

7/6/2026 at 9:23:47 PM

Proof here: https://xcancel.com/timnitGebru

TLDR: if you're speaking about tech in public, and you're white, she probably has published a couple of hateful posts about you.

This is an extremely unserious person.

by gordian-mind

7/6/2026 at 3:52:35 PM

Her demands included wanting to know the identities of anyone who wanted to comment on her paper, after she had a history of going after people publicly. That's enough right there, nobody should tolerate toxic behavior regardless of whether you agree with the politics.

Meanwhile, the paper has 2 points of criticism towards AI. 1 is a bunch of carbon consumption complaints assuming NVIDIA cards with coal-fired power, while a lot of effort at contemporary Google went towards getting TPUs running on green power. I suspect this was what people wanted to object to, a lot of effort went into those green power projects and she was just denying it. The complaint seems prophetic now but it was not true about Google then.

The other criticism was about which language the LLMs use, they average the input data of normal humans instead of talking the way the paper author thinks they should talk. The phrase "women doctors" is called out as problematic. I'm less inclined to think people objected strongly to this given the zeitgeist at the time, it was probably people who worked on the green energy projects and were pissed off that their contributions were ignored, but still, nobody elected her Queen of English, she can have her opinions but she's not a victim for not having them adopted by everyone.

by nixon_why69

7/6/2026 at 7:05:03 PM

One of the key points of that paper is that the body of written works is biased and those biases will be amplified by compressing that body into LLMs, with outlier data, with low coincidence rate, being suppressed as unreliable - data that is structurally dissimilar to the bulk is noise. Similarly to how PageRank suppressed nodes with low number of edges, probably contributing significantly to the homogenous corporate mall-internet we enjoy today.

by mondrian

7/6/2026 at 5:02:30 PM

I think this is completely misleading. If your employer asks to redact your paper because it ignores relevant research, naturally you want to know what research they are talking about and on what grounds, and also which researches reviewed the paper (probably assuming there was none, review process was used as an excuse to silence criticism, G has done it many times).

(BTW, quite bold to say input data from Reddit and 4Chan is how “normal” people speak. There is a lot of language in the training data of any model you really do not wish your application to use ever.)

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 6:32:55 PM

I'm surprised that people still take Gebru seriously. She is a disgrace to the community because she always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my assessment on an ML model? You are white male oppressor (her attacking a Google's SVP). Oh, did I mention that she even said that some loss functions are more racists than others on X?

Gebru is not a researcher. She is a modern-age Trofim Lysenko, who politicizes everything and wields political correctness as a weapon to purge any dissent.

by hintymad

7/6/2026 at 6:48:53 PM

Ugh. Ok if you're going to push one-sided propaganda I'll push the other side.

Google forced its researchers to retract an already submitted paper because it undermined its strategic and commercial story around large language models. The "we just accepted her resignation" is just a lie. Google made harsh demands with opaque reviewers that made vague objections, and then Jeff Dean moved very quickly to get rid of Gebru. Other Google researchers reported that they usually got to work through objections, Gebru got no such opportunity. Google showed that AI labs will not tolerate internal research that seriously criticizes technology central to its business.

by guelo

7/6/2026 at 6:58:26 PM

Dean pulled a sweet Dungeon Master move in "accepting her resignation." She should have made them fire her, esp for ostensibly doing the job she was hired to do.

by thx67

7/6/2026 at 4:00:37 PM

Pressuring an employee to add unethical behavior or specific religious practices to their job description is constructive termination.

I'd say what's under debate is whether uncritical LLM adoption is mainly unethical or mainly religious.

by myhf

7/6/2026 at 4:10:43 PM

This is not why she was fired and wouldn't have been a plausible reason in 2020 when it happened.

>Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.

This is Google's side of it; I think the following is a fair piece of primary-source journalism if you want to go deeper:

https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-...

by ToValueFunfetti

7/6/2026 at 4:22:36 PM

I don't see why it's those are the only two options, nor why they are even mutually exclusive.

by naasking

7/6/2026 at 3:38:30 PM

Here is what Jeff Dean said about the firing at the time: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ...

by ayhanfuat

7/6/2026 at 6:12:17 PM

She was probably repeating behaviors she learned in academia. These kinds of extremely toxic "don't just apologize for disagreeing with me but also give me the name of every person involved for collective punishment" is a classic move for academic tyrants throwing weight around. The understanding there is that they will then move to cut off every named person from power or access to academic resources. Google did the right thing by protecting their people.

I have watched it happen multiple times that someone from academia joins a research group at a large corporation and finds out to their chagrin that they can't just overtly bully colleagues as easily without tenure.

edit: And it looks like Mitchell immediately left an angry comment about being called a "linguist" despite the article never doing so. Starting to notice a pattern of confrontation, ego, and escalation among some of these people.

by viccis

7/6/2026 at 5:03:13 PM

> resignation

I appeciate short letters like this that get straight to the point...

by f33d5173

7/6/2026 at 6:50:41 PM

You can always count on management to tell it like it is /s

by guelo

7/6/2026 at 3:34:01 PM

> With the octopus thought experiment, I initially had told the story in terms of a dolphin, because dolphins clearly are intelligent animals. My co-author on that paper, Alexander Koller, said it should be an octopus, because first of all, the environment that octopuses live in is much more distinct from where people live. It makes the metaphor more vivid, that the octopus is just feeling these pulses in the cable and has no way to look at what the people are looking at.

On a completely tangential sidenote, octopusses are actually very very intelligent: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 3:49:08 PM

It's such a tragedy that they're also extremely solitary animals and die shortly after reproducing the first (and only) time.

Almost all other particularly intelligent animals seem to be gregarious, and it's easy to conclude that a social lifestyle tends to select for more intelligence, a sophisticated theory of mind, and so on (I like to think that that's exactly what was responsible for a runaway intelligence explosion in humans). But in the case of cephalopods, there's something else that has been applying selection pressure towards exceptional intelligence.

by Sharlin

7/6/2026 at 4:18:22 PM

I agree, which is why I think this species might be the start of something amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larger_Pacific_striped_octopus

by andrewflnr

7/6/2026 at 4:54:56 PM

I've never heard of these before, that's fascinating, thank you!

by Folcon

7/6/2026 at 3:55:18 PM

It's also a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: if they were raised by their parents like all other more intelligent animals, they wouldn't need to be as intelligent as they are in order to be able to relearn "octopus behaviour" without help from other members of the species.

by rob74

7/6/2026 at 4:52:16 PM

In Stefan Wul's SF novel "Nyourk", octopi evolve to become the Earth's dominant species, which was quite prescient back in 1957, when almost nobody knew octopi to be intelligent. :)

by wazoox

7/6/2026 at 3:51:37 PM

Also, last time I checked, the environment where octopuses live is actually the exact same environment where dolphins live?

by rob74

7/6/2026 at 4:12:30 PM

Well in a sense that monkeys and Great Condor inhabit the exact same environment.

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 5:46:04 PM

That's a bit exaggerated - monkeys can't fly, but both dolphins and octopuses can swim. I'm aware octopuses prefer to stay at the bottom, while dolphins have to come to the surface regularly to breathe, but for me it's still the same environment...

by rob74

7/6/2026 at 5:57:50 PM

Tidal basins and ocean bottoms are very different from the open ocean surface. Much like tree tops and 3 miles in the air are different. Both are up in the air, but still quite different, just like "ocean" but still different.

by burnte

7/6/2026 at 5:55:28 PM

You know monkeys can swim? Do you know what happens to a monkey 2-6km under the surface? Monkeys can also climb trees, very high. Monkey still no condor, sadly.

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 3:46:02 PM

The continued use of animal metaphors is doing them a great disservice. Esp as we learn more about animal cognition, on first look, it smacks of human exceptionalism that has littered the historic scientific consensus.

Now if they had said, "Imagine your average American ..." (/s)

by genxy

7/6/2026 at 6:32:32 PM

Bender's linked May 12, 2026 post "Frequently Unasked Questions", https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/stochastic-parrots-freq... , was a better read.

by troelsSteegin

7/6/2026 at 3:40:07 PM

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have actually read the paper then please list a few criticisms. all i have seen is "oh this wasn't that good of a paper" or "can't believe how bad this paper was".

by dwa3592

7/6/2026 at 7:59:37 PM

The authors were wrong about their core thesis and are now lying about it. That's the only criticism needed. They said, quote:

> LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form

... which is presented as unarguable fact, yet is untrue. It was obviously wrong at the time it was written and it's been proven wrong in many ways since. Worse is that they're still at it. In the article she's saying:

> Q: What are the most common misconceptions about the “stochastic parrots” metaphor? Bender: I think one of the biggest ones is, “Bender says AI is a stochastic parrot.”

Her name is on a paper titled "On the danger of stochastic parrots". It has a section titled "Stochastic parrots" and in section 6.1 it says:

> An LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.

She did say that, as clear as day. Now she's trying to rewrite history. Ugly behavior.

by mike_hearn

7/6/2026 at 8:50:35 PM

No, they were correct. In fact an LLM stitches together stuff it observed in its training data. That scales up way better than a lot of us expected, but it's still correct.

If you train it on lots of working code, then it's useful for coding. If you trained it primarily on non-working code it would produce nonsense.

by nyeah

7/6/2026 at 9:10:11 PM

I read your comment multiple times and sorry to say none of your criticisms make any logical sense in any shape or form whatsoever.

>> > LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form

did you read the paper carefully??? this line is directly cited from another paper (pay attention - it's from july 2020) . the full line is - LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form [ 14 ]

the paper its cited from is titled - Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data

>>>She did say that, as clear as day. Now she's trying to rewrite history. Ugly behavior.

did you read the article after that line or was there a shortage of attention span??

by dwa3592

7/6/2026 at 7:12:08 PM

The contention that there is no grounding because the training data is linguistic and thus can only reference a world model is disproven in "This sentence has five words"- there's real, grounded information about what "five" means within that sentence. While that's a trivial counterexample, I don't know that it's an obvious one (I didn't come up with it myself).

It's not a criticism of the paper itself, but multimodal models came shortly after and provide grounding that is more of the sort the paper is getting at, and it didn't seem like anybody updated on that at all. If multimodal models were still stochastic parrots by the original argument, humans would have to be as well; we don't have any way to ground anything beneath sense data and evolution can't have programmed some innate grounding into us because it didn't either. But (and maybe this is my own misperception) nobody threw in the towel at that point.

I confess I never read the original paper until now, opting to absorb by osmosis instead, and I was quite surprised that they don't really make a deeper case than that. After just a few paragraphs about how they can't be grounded because humans don't express their thoughts directly, it lurches into a page about how they can be biased by training. And they certainly can be, but that has little to say about their stochastic nature- humans are biased as a rule with no exception. (For the record, I only read the Stochastic Parrots section before this reply.)

It's not really a bad paper, but I don't see why it ever carried the esteem it did. Hating on it is like hating on Taylor Swift- she's fine, yes, but for her level of success, one is inclined to question every dumb lyric where others get a pass. (Apologies to Swift fans, substitute a successful artist you don't care for here.)

by ToValueFunfetti

7/6/2026 at 8:17:25 PM

>>The contention that there is no grounding because the training data is linguistic and thus can only reference a world model is disproven in "This sentence has five words"- there's real, grounded information about what "five" means within that sentence.

did you think this through?

imagine the sentence was "This sentence has four words", now extrapolate that to all the shit that can exist in a dataset and train a model on that dataset - do you know what will happen? - go ahead and think it through.

by dwa3592

7/6/2026 at 9:41:34 PM

I don't think this tone is at all justified. If you think otherwise, I do ask that you point out where I went too far in a comment that I feared was overburdened by caveats and admissions of my own human flaws.

"This sentence has five words" is going to appear far more often than "This sentence has four words". This is the entire premise of LLMs working at all, stochastic parrots or otherwise.

by ToValueFunfetti

7/6/2026 at 9:29:44 PM

To add to dwa3592's comment, a sentence is not a self-contained idea. The sentence doesn't include what any of the words in it mean, nor what "this sentence" refers to. The exact same sentence can mean different things depending on the text that surrounds it.

by fluoridation

7/6/2026 at 9:48:01 PM

Fair point, and on its own it would be surprising to learn what "five" means from that sentence. But you can extrapolate- across a billion sentences, there will be "the next sentence has five words"s and "this sentence are grammared wrong" and so on. It would not be at all impossible to ground a world model on pure text for that reason. And 'not impossible' is sufficient to invalidate the paper's argument.

by ToValueFunfetti

7/6/2026 at 5:17:58 PM

My main criticism of the paper is that it says LLMs work "haphazardly", using probabilistic information. That is a hypothesis, but it is stated as a known fact, a fundamental limitation.

It is true that LLMs often behave haphazardly, and do rely on statistics. But plenty of research has shown them behaving in methodical ways too. There are findings going both ways!

Granted, many of the strongest contradictory results appeared after the Stochastic Parrots paper, so it isn't like they were ignoring the literature at the time. But they did make a very strong claim, and in the half-decade since, a lot of evidence has come out against it.

by azakai

7/6/2026 at 5:38:21 PM

not sure your criticism makes sense though - they did this pre chatgpt. they are talking about the language models of that time. they did not make predictions about the future.

by dwa3592

7/6/2026 at 6:37:45 PM

They made a claim about language models in general, not just ones that had been released so far.

The point of the paper, in fact, is that language models are getting "too big", and another approach is needed to make progress, so they were certainly predicting things about later models.

With that said, they talked about "pure" language models, so it is fair to say that they didn't talk about, say, LLMs that are multimodal or that have tool use, which are advances that happened after their paper.

by azakai

7/6/2026 at 5:54:51 PM

They did use RLHF at the time, at which point it is not a pure probabilistic representation of the training corpora. Bizarrely, RLHF never came up in the paper.

by mediaman

7/6/2026 at 7:51:17 PM

Statistical operation doesn’t preclude logical processing.

We’ve know that since 1943 when McCulloch-Pitts came up with the first “artificial neuron” definition. And since LLMs are a descendant technology — our assumption should be they’re reasoning in some internal learned logic.

This is what the evidence supports — eg, the “stochastic parrot” crowd never can explain transfer learning. Whereas for the internal reasoning crowd that is easy: removing your top level judgments from a theory still leaves you with useful terms for describing a new theory — eg, removing your judgments about “which animal is this?” but preserving the underlying structure for representing an image in your new judgments, “is this cancer?”

There’s 80 years of reason to think DNNs reason and zero support other than “sTaTs R mAgIc!” to support the stochastic parrot interpretation.

Ignorance isn’t argument.

by zmgsabst

7/6/2026 at 4:13:11 PM

Those costs have to be compared to the way things are currently done without AI.

They never are. Ever.

by CamperBob2

7/6/2026 at 5:24:22 PM

It is a good blog, not a good paper.

by matusp

7/6/2026 at 6:49:49 PM

My criticism centers on the part of the paper they chose for their title, the “stochastic parrot” metaphor. And my criticism is that if you observe Claude code with opus 4.8 working through an entirely novel problem that nobody has ever worked on before and which certainly wasn’t in its training data, the choice to even metaphorically call them stochastic parrots turned out to be egregiously wrong.

And secondarily, and maybe only partially the authors’ fault, is the enormous tidal wave of morons that this paper minted who plague us with their misunderstandings to this day.

by daishi55

7/6/2026 at 8:21:19 PM

oh boy! the lack of critical thinking here is staggering.

>>And my criticism is that if you observe Claude code with opus 4.8 working through an entirely novel problem that nobody has ever worked on before and which certainly wasn’t in its training data, the choice to even metaphorically call them stochastic parrots turned out to be egregiously wrong.

First of all, for your own benefit - Claude code stopped showing the real reasoning. It only shows a summarized version of it now. So don't ever ask someone to observe the model. Second, do you know when this paper came out? do you know when opus 4.8 came out??? how do you know what is novel? did opus 4.8 tell you it was novel? how do you know no one has worked on it before?

by dwa3592

7/6/2026 at 3:42:12 PM

Personally, I've always read that paper as a political criticism of industry and industrialized research and capitalism. After decades in academic (and industrialized research) I've learned that smart people can write convincing takedowns of things they hate- and those takedowns, due to being well written, often punch above their weight in terms of impact on the community.

I think this paper would have been best split off from the conjoined criticism of environmental effects (which could have been its own paper, but not one published by Google, since their leadership's fundamental beliefs disagree with the paper's environmental impact premise. And the remaining part on text models could have been a bit more focused on the technical issues associated with statistical text processing and meaning, rather than criticism of the power structure that is loosely associated with the current AI push.

by dekhn

7/6/2026 at 4:06:18 PM

This all sounds like a lot of backpedaling and “well actually” kind of stuff.

“Stochastic parrot got picked up and interpreted by other people as a minimization or an insult. It was not meant that way. Other people might be using it that way but that’s not how I intended it”.

Yeah that’s because it was chosen to be an insulting phrase.. Parroting is only ever used as a pejorative phrase. But sure, everyone else mindlessly parroting this line is the problem here.

This paper was always lousy, but it has really not aged well. We are living in a world when where an LLM has solved an Erdos problem. In a world where LLMs produce novel results that rival human thinking any conceptual reduction of an LLM is going to start inviting some unpleasant comparisons with human thinking.

by blululu

7/6/2026 at 4:13:28 PM

Yes, and I don't understand how people like this paper authors mostly disregard all these achievements. It is obvious now that our common definition of "understanding" either is flawed, or at least needs redefining and precisioning.

by theragra

7/6/2026 at 3:50:44 PM

I don’t see a problem with the “stochastic parrot” label. It just turns out stochastic parrots are incredibly useful.

At a minimum it’s probably more accurate than “AI”.

by softwaredoug

7/6/2026 at 4:00:09 PM

Whether Bender intended it or not, the term has an inherently pejorative sense. "Parroting" is not really indicative of what modern LLMs do. However, when most people bring it up as a criticism of "AI in general" in 2026, they're using it as a pointer to all of the social/environmental criticisms, rather than the technological capabilities.

by TaupeRanger

7/6/2026 at 5:07:09 PM

We're all going to stay fixated on what exactly a "parrot" is, but the paper doesn't rest on the definition of tropical birds: it advances a specific and detailed hypothesis about how language models don't operate with communicative intent, and in fact the meaning humans obtain from LLM output is a cognitive pattern matching illusion. Those claims have not held up at all.

At this point, I think the authors are really counting on people not to read their paper.

by tptacek

7/6/2026 at 5:24:56 PM

How can you articulate a criticism without a repetition of your criticism becoming "inherently pejorative"?

You can't. That's just the way the news goes.

Essentially, what you are saying is that because some people somewhere frame a statement as pejorative, the statement itself is inherently pejorative. By that logic, every criticism ever articulated is inherently an insult.

by thomastjeffery

7/6/2026 at 4:15:10 PM

Why is it not indicative of what LLM’s do?

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 4:26:32 PM

Because they don't just parrot, they interpolate, which is why they have such varied abilities. You can't explain the range of behaviours they have with just parroting, and once you accept that, why shouldn't this qualify as some form of intelligence?

by naasking

7/6/2026 at 4:45:57 PM

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.

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 4:23:17 PM

Really? Are you under the impression that parrots are able to synthesize their input and create entirely new, useful outputs which they have never heard before?

by TaupeRanger

7/6/2026 at 4:44:52 PM

The "stochastic" is the key modifier to "parrot".

> "Stochastic" means having a random pattern or variable that can be analyzed statistically but not predicted precisely

by softwaredoug

7/6/2026 at 4:36:46 PM

Yes, I am: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 4:29:29 PM

I think stochastic parroting is really a very accurate description of what they do (if underserving of the overall usefulness of LLMs). As long as you consider they are parroting from the whole of human intelligence. Its just that as they have gotten more sophisticated, the amount of gates, guardrails, and tertiary tools add variety. Trace any LLM hallucination back to provenance and you begin to see how the stochastic parrot works.

by inspectorSlap

7/6/2026 at 4:23:42 PM

Yeah, there's some beautiful math underlying what LLMs are doing, and it's the same math our neocortex runs on.

by koverstreet

7/6/2026 at 4:44:07 PM

There's plenty of beautiful math there, but the relationship to what our neocortex does is pretty distant. Individual biological neurons can do fairly complicated things, including compute 10-bit parity functions (you would normally need a 3-layer MLP with a bunch of digital neurons to do this). And they don't seem to use backpropagation for learning.

by dekhn

7/6/2026 at 4:30:50 PM

Could you provide more detail? My understanding is that the neocortex is predominantly focused on forwards simulation, which seems distinct to how transformers operate.

by ainch

7/6/2026 at 4:48:50 PM

That's fundamental to how anything that compresses/understands the world has to work, in the Kolmogeravian sense. That's why people denigrate LLMs as being just "next token predictors" - they're not wrong, but they're missing the point.

Because to do that kind of prediction out in the world you have to build up an accurate model of reality - a model that includes yourself! Which is why we and LLMs are self aware.

For the "how", it's been known for some time that LLMs operate on a Reimannian manifold - the semantic manifold - and that's a good place to start if you want to learn how they actually work; how a Reimannian manifold (plus some extra structure on top) can represent natural language in a form you can do work with is the part I find particularly beautiful. At a high level, the neocortex and LLMs appear to compute on the manifold in basically the same way - though a lot of the details are different; both are more sophisticated in some areas and less in others.

by koverstreet

7/6/2026 at 6:05:21 PM

I'm afraid the precise connection you're making isn't totally obvious to me.

As far as prediction - I mean sure the cortex and LLMs do prediction, but then so can RNNs or diffusion models or any other generative model. Really any ML architecture is learning to compress its environment in pursuit of modelling. More broadly, the predictive brain model would suggest that all of the brain, not just the neocortex, is dedicated to prediction. What would you say makes LLMs similar to the neocortex, rather than the basal ganglia or Broca's area?

Similarly, if you agree with the Manifold Hypothesis, then all machine learning models operate on manifolds. I agree it's an exciting thought, but then I don't know what would distinguish an LLM from a VAE or SVM in terms of operating over a low-dimensional manifold embedded in high dimensional spaces - maybe just scale?

by ainch

7/6/2026 at 6:47:57 PM

> More broadly, the predictive brain model would suggest that all of the brain, not just the neocortex, is dedicated to prediction. What would you say makes LLMs similar to the neocortex, rather than the basal ganglia or Broca's area?

The whole brain is most definitely not dedicated to prediction, and I don't think "prediction" is a very useful model anyways. You could say the hippocampus is for "prediction" if you really squint, but that's underselling what it's doing. And the basal ganglia operates off of prediction error, but it's more about regulating short timescale feedback loop learning than learning itself - speaking somewhat loosely because it's a particularly ancient structure in the brain and things get muddied.

LLMs obviously don't have functional equivalents to either of those - sure they can remember facts, but they can't intake new facts the way we can, the hippocampus is set up completely differently. But higher reasoning is humans is the neocortex, and that LLMs can do, and there's even structural parallels - LLMs and the neocortex are both implemented in layers, and you can even (with a shit ton of analysis) watch how LLMs walk the geometry across layers. The neocortex needs a lot fewer layers than LLMs, but that's because it's not pure feedforward across layers; the neocortex already does what the "looped LLM" people are trying to do.

> Similarly, if you agree with the Manifold Hypothesis, then all machine learning models operate on manifolds. I agree it's an exciting thought, but then I don't know what would distinguish an LLM from a VAE or SVM in terms of operating over a low-dimensional manifold embedded in high dimensional spaces - maybe just scale?

I view things more mathematically, and in math and physics it frequently turns out that there's really only one solution to a problem, or correct way to model something - and then everything else is just isomorphisms (which may be interesting objects in their own right!).

My interpretation/guess (informed by research, but with a lot of still unanswered questions) is that the manifold is fundamentally the structure that emerges from natural language: natural language has a computational model, just like Church/Turing machines have a computational model. Reimannian manifold is also underselling it a bit, it's also Finsler, and RoPE adds additional structure to that manifold (and when we get to RoPE it wouldn't surprise me if the neocortex and LLMs do diverge significantly in how they compute, but does the structure change? dunno yet).

Basically, I'm fairly confident in what I say about machine learning models that understand natural language; for non-NL machine learning, maybe the same structure emerges with enough complexity, but I haven't really pondered that.

by koverstreet

7/6/2026 at 5:59:24 PM

> and it's the same math our neocortex runs on.

The math is based upon theories of how the brain work, but even if those theories are right, this math is a great simplification and subset of what organic brains do.

by burnte

7/6/2026 at 6:44:12 PM

This is a clear application of motte and Bailey. Motte: LLMs are stochastic parrots and don’t understand the text. They frequently hallucinate and are unreliable.

Bailey: well your version

by simianwords

7/6/2026 at 6:35:50 PM

What I look forward to after research like https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02491, which demonstrate the necessity of world-modeling capability to achieve satisfactory performance on certain goals, is a refractor the SoTA test suites to demonstrate how much world-modeling is necessary in various task distributions.

There have been a few years now of arguments about the level to which transformers do or do not have a world model (v.s. being purely stochastic parrots like early pre-trained LLMs) and now we have some tools to actually make quantifiable determinations.

by benlivengood

7/6/2026 at 6:40:11 PM

But the stochastic parrot (LLM) is the world model, isn't it? What's the difference?

by thomastjeffery

7/6/2026 at 6:43:13 PM

Yeah… LLMs clearly already have a world model

by simianwords

7/6/2026 at 7:01:59 PM

I think it's a good distinction to make between having and being, which seems to be what the whole "stochastic parrots" bit was intended to make all along.

It doesn't make sense to say a model is in possession of its self. That's exactly the sort of poetic anthropomorphization that Bender was criticising here, and a good reason to not refer to an LLM as "an AI".

by thomastjeffery

7/6/2026 at 7:07:47 PM

Wow this is exactly kind of pedanticism that annoys me with Bender. Glad that this kinda thing is becoming unpopular.

by simianwords

7/6/2026 at 7:15:31 PM

There is more here then pedantry, but if you aren't interested in it, then go right ahead and live your life.

by thomastjeffery

7/6/2026 at 5:51:24 PM

Bender's paper had this to say about stochastic parrots:

"Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot."

This was not even a correct criticism in 2021. She is right that, at the time, the pretraining -- where it learns to predict missing words in pre-existing corpuses of text -- is basically a stochastic parrot.

But nowhere in her paper does the term "reinforcement" come up. At the time, this was done mainly through RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) - after the initial training is done, you then tune the model's responses based on human grading. Humans imbue their own meanings into the parameter weights through their judgment.

At this point, they aren't really stochastic parrots anymore, because parameter weights have been shaped beyond the text corpus. It's not purely probabilistic in the sense of using the probabilities of the underlying text sequences. (It still is probabilistic in its output, but that is a pointless claim, because all events in the universe are also probabilistic; it is not enough to merely claim that probability is involved in some way in the outputs.)

RLHF was already in use prior to the paper, and was written about by Christiano in 2017 "Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences," so it's surprising that Bender apparently didn't know about this well-known paper.

RLHF was also, of course, a precursor to a more advanced form of parameter shaping - reinforcement learning with verified rewards, or RLVF, which has driven a lot of the gains in verifiable domains lately. That was not done in 2021 when she wrote the paper. But if you knew about RLHF -- and knew how Alpha Zero worked, with training neural nets on game rollouts -- you could squint and see that it might be useful for language models.

So after being proven to not only having a limited understanding of the field at the time, but also not being able to forecast the field, she's now walking back what she meant by "stochastic parrot," I assume because she believes readers will not read what she wrote. But despite the protests, her original claim was that it is a parrot because the text has no meaning -- a direct quote from the paper, which only really makes sense if training stops at the pretrain.

by mediaman

7/6/2026 at 7:33:22 PM

Even if pre-training was the only training step, it still wouldn't necessarily follow that the only thing the model is doing is stitching words together probabilistically, unless you expand the definition of "probabilistically" to the point that it becomes meaningless. This kind of thinking assumes that design of the training process and the "design" of the artifact that training produces must be similar.

by emtel

7/6/2026 at 4:54:39 PM

Her language consistently defines LLMs in negative terms like “synthetic text extruder” but she claims she’s not trying to denigrate it. What’s missing for me are similar terms from her about how humans create sentences and thoughts. Judging by the state of the internet humans are quite capable of making shit up to argue their point (see latest Fox News apology). She talks about sycophantic AI but give me a car battery and some cables and I can train a sycophantic human (no I can’t but there are people who can). She’s pretty much a walking counter argument for her own claims.

by lowbloodsugar

7/6/2026 at 3:44:08 PM

I'm sorry but I do tend to feel like this muddies up the discussion on "what this technology really is".

I think "artificial" is actually a pretty good term to describe the output of the models. That output does appear to resemble at least some definition of the word "intelligence" - there is some ability there to do cognition over information that's been provided to them in-context.

What is it to understand, then? If they can work in complex domains and produce coherent output, it would seem to necessitate at least some definition of "understanding" of the corpus, even if that understanding is unlike how a human's brain would understand it.

What else should we call them then? They model language and information in ways that allow them to manipulate it on the fly. They do so 'unnaturally' from a human's point of reference.

I legitimately can't come up with a better term than 'artifical intelligence' -- not to be confused with artificial consciousness, which I don't think exists (yet).

by wolttam

7/6/2026 at 3:51:59 PM

"Virtual intelligence" is better. Transformer ANNs are dramatically dumber than cockroaches and it doesn't make sense to describe such a system as being artificially intelligent, for the same reason it doesn't make sense to describe Half-Life: Alyx as an "artificial reality." An artificial reality implies some sort of scientific fidelity to actual reality. A virtual reality just has to be temporarily convincing. Likewise transformer LLMs have essentially zero actual intelligence - e.g. SOTA "reasoning" models still seem much worse at small-integer quantitative reasoning than almost all vertebrates. But LLMs have an enormous amount of formal subject matter knowledge and inexhaustible stamina at solving tedious O(n) problems. So for many purposes they are an adequate virtual intelligence. At least temporarily.

by Diogenesian

7/6/2026 at 4:40:11 PM

> Transformer ANNs are dramatically dumber than cockroaches

Source?

by josh-sematic

7/6/2026 at 4:58:20 PM

My source is "none of us have ever seen a robot that can navigate unfamiliar 3D spaces as well as a cockroach." If transformers were capable of the job we would have seen a smart robot by now. But all of our robots are truly mindless compared to the simplest insects.

I will change my mind if someone demonstrates such a robot. Absent this demonstration, cockroach-level AI is still an unsolved problem. Given how ignorant and arrogant and wealthy AI researchers are, it will remain unsolved. I don't think anyone alive today will live to see a robot smarter than an ant.

by Diogenesian

7/6/2026 at 5:32:04 PM

We might as well say that none of us have ever seen a cockroach that can solve Erdos problems as well as an LLM. Or write code, or stories, etc.

by Al-Khwarizmi

7/6/2026 at 6:55:12 PM

Then one can claim that humans are less intelligent than a goldfish as "none of us have ever seen a human swim as well as a goldfish".

by throwaway7356

7/6/2026 at 8:31:19 PM

It's around hour 20 of trying to breath that I start to really think the Goldfish has an edge on me.

by thechao

7/6/2026 at 5:46:19 PM

[dead]

by juanani

7/6/2026 at 3:54:49 PM

Large language model is the term for what most people call "artificial intelligence". Bender's point is that labeling everything as artificial intelligence makes it more difficult to get funded or to regulate the technology. It's like walking into a car and being enamored by all the technology and saying "It's all computer". Yes, it's computers but that is not an accurate description of the many technologies inside that car.

by magicmicah85

7/6/2026 at 3:58:33 PM

Doesn't really matter that much what they're called as long as they're useful, and LLMs (particularly when harnessed) are already ridiculously useful. But it also begs the question: are stochastic parrots useful?

by skeledrew

7/6/2026 at 4:47:19 PM

Yes, they are. Likely due to a deep relationship between math and physics, statistical modelling of complex natural phenomena has repeatedly been shown to be the most effective approach. This is true of LLMs, but also of many stochastic (and other) systems.

by dekhn

7/6/2026 at 3:47:16 PM

> when OpenAI imposed ChatGPT on the world...

OpenAI offered ChatGPT to the world. A large, monied cross-section of the world had yet to throw its capital behind the Large Language Model technology that made the ChatBot possible. While it is fair to see AI development now as a global imposition, OpenAI did not have the agency as a 2022 startup to impose on the scale we see now.

by waffletower

7/6/2026 at 3:59:52 PM

I agree with a lot of her points but that word really is revealing of her thoughts about OpenAI.

by magicmicah85

7/6/2026 at 4:31:46 PM

> A large, monied cross-section of the world

I asked Mistral, and it guestimated that Altman, Thiel, Musk, and Hoffman had like $20.3B together when they founded it. Sound to me that the founding of OpenAI was exactly the point when the monied world threw its dollars behind AI.

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 3:30:43 PM

I respect you and parrots, please don’t use parrots as an insult.

by iwontberude

7/6/2026 at 3:44:11 PM

Anyone who has spent time with parrots would realise that they can understand the meaning of speech without knowing what the words mean. Then somehow the meaning of word parts, and then you will find them making new words out of other words. Very clever indeed.

So stochastic parrots could indeed be a good description of LLMs. But I think that she meant it as a diminishing term (against the technology) which is pointless. Probably more of a reaction against SV tech bros than more nuanced interpretations.

by angry_octet

7/6/2026 at 3:34:32 PM

it annoys me how eager people are to hurl the word stochastic as pejorative. Statistics are a great tool for gleaning information from stochastic processes; statistics don't contribute randomness. Random sampling is necessary in order not to bias a sample, it's not used to contribute randomness to the sample but to preserve/measure the underlying distribution. (not meant to imply that training is random sampling)

by fsckboy

7/6/2026 at 3:51:36 PM

It's a pejorative only because determinism is what makes computers useful in the first place. You get a consistent result, every single time, unlike if you have a human in the loop. Because LLMs are stochastic, they have removed the thing that makes computers useful to us, thus it's a pejorative.

by bigstrat2003

7/6/2026 at 4:33:49 PM

It turns out that determinism isn't what makes computers useful in the first place.

by DangitBobby

7/6/2026 at 4:40:21 PM

1. Determinism is a very small subset of what makes computers useful. Non-determinism like stochasticity is literally everywhere, like random seeds.

2. LLMs are detemrinistic. They have a parameter to tune how stochastic they are.

by naasking

7/6/2026 at 3:25:59 PM

'Stochastic parrots' is a great term, but reading it now, it's quite apparent how bad this paper is.

by baggy_trough

7/6/2026 at 5:10:56 PM

[dead]

by SonOfLilit

7/6/2026 at 3:26:31 PM

[flagged]

by crancher

7/6/2026 at 3:31:14 PM

[flagged]

by platypii

7/6/2026 at 3:23:31 PM

[dead]

by bubbi

7/6/2026 at 3:24:48 PM

The term is not very useful since most humans are stochastic parrots... At least most of the time.

Not suggesting that I don't say stuff on autopilot sometimes but for many people, it's their only mode of operation. They never actually think about anything from first principles. Their whole approach to language is just chaining catchphrases together. It's how a toddler thinks; it seems like many people never moved past that stage of development.

by jongjong

7/6/2026 at 3:32:20 PM

It sometimes feels same as with the models, especially in corporate:

- Lots of Haiku around, many mistakes unless process is very clear - Some Sonnets, still do mistakes but can adapt - Some Opus, able to improvise and think outside the box.

But even the Human Opus/Mythos are hilariously wrong sometimes.

by elysianfields

7/6/2026 at 3:29:46 PM

i think it actually makes sense, an LLM just imitates human communication, which happens to be useful from time to time.

by lennoff

7/6/2026 at 3:37:25 PM

Conversely, that the most prominent proponents of LLMs call them artificial intelligence and then treat them like slaves they're free to abuse ought to be horrifying.

by GolfPopper

7/6/2026 at 3:54:37 PM

Nothing in that term implies sentience.

by jeremyjh

7/6/2026 at 3:38:46 PM

> most humans are stochastic parrots

There's a lot more happening behind the scenes when a human repeats phrases than what's happening in an LLM.

Sociological phenomenon. The desire to be liked, successful, or popular. The feeling that those phrases brings up.

LLMs are not experiencing any of that. As far as we know, neither is a parrot.

by TonyAlicea10

7/6/2026 at 3:44:05 PM

Parrots certainly do experience social needs

by xgulfie

7/6/2026 at 9:46:53 PM

Fair but not the human sociology I mean.

by TonyAlicea10

7/6/2026 at 4:01:01 PM

The "parrot" part of "stochastic parrot" is quite an ambiguous choice. Taken literally, it's referencing an animal that's actually quite intelligent and capable of complex, novel tasks but has no way to connect those to human language. How I've always read this though is the more literary meaning of "parrot" as "a thing that repeats words with no context". Perhaps "stochastic photocopier" would be a clearer metaphor.

by AlexandrB

7/6/2026 at 4:28:55 PM

Or perhaps tape recorder would reflect the linearity of the input/output strings

by xgulfie

7/6/2026 at 3:43:15 PM

Humans are not stochastic parrots. You are 100% wrong about toddlers. This was clearly explained by St. Augustine 1500 years ago:

  Did I not, then, as I grew out of infancy, come next to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me and succeed my infancy? My infancy did not go away (for where would it go?). It was simply no longer present; and I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I remember this, and I have since observed how I learned to speak. My elders did not teach me words by rote, as they taught me my letters afterward. But I myself, when I was unable to communicate all I wished to say to whomever I wished by means of whimperings and grunts and various gestures of my limbs (which I used to reinforce my demands), I myself repeated the sounds already stored in my memory by the mind which thou, O my God, hadst given me. When they called some thing by name and pointed it out while they spoke, I saw it and realized that the thing they wished to indicate was called by the name they then uttered. And what they meant was made plain by the gestures of their bodies, by a kind of natural language, common to all nations, which expresses itself through changes of countenance, glances of the eye, gestures and intonations which indicate a disposition and attitude--either to seek or to possess, to reject or to avoid. So it was that by frequently hearing words, in different phrases, I gradually identified the objects which the words stood for and, having formed my mouth to repeat these signs, I was thereby able to express my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me the verbal signs by which we express our wishes and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending all the while upon the authority of my parents and the behest of my elders.

[https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/conf.pdf]

Humans learn language opportunistically. Toddlers start with a powerful "superchimpanzee" understanding of the real world, and use that to learn words in order to satisfy their needs and desires. Statistical frequency is incidental to what words a toddler learns: what matters is the real-world context. Also note how important it is that infants instinctively understand nonverbal communication.

The most depressing thing about the 2020s AI summer is watching ignorant tech workers use the success of LLMs to launder their own ignorant misanthropy. Your views are many many centuries out of date.

by Diogenesian

7/6/2026 at 4:38:37 PM

FWIW nothing in this comment refutes any claims made in the comment it replies to. It's probably not the worst thing in the world for humans to start being a little more humble about themselves and their capabilities. Anthropocentrism has been a fucking disaster.

by DangitBobby

7/6/2026 at 4:20:16 PM

I really appreciate the effort you put in to this post. Posts like these are what makes HN great. Thank you.

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 3:56:02 PM

This is a complete misunderstanding of how even idiots function in the real world. There is a lot of thinking that goes into living a human (or even animal) life that models are nowhere near ready to model yet. Even ignoring the physical interaction side, the way any human sets and achieves long term goals (such as getting and maintaining a job), interacting with the huge amount of systems present in day to day life, and learning new tools along the way for decades is far beyond the current abilities of these models - even if they handily beat 90-100% of humanity on some tasks normally considered much harder.

by tsimionescu

7/6/2026 at 3:26:30 PM

> It argued that large language models (LLMs) generate text by statistically predicting likely sequences of words rather than understanding what they are saying—a process the authors captured with the metaphor of a “stochastic parrot,” a system that repeats patterns without comprehension.

I don't understand what we're setting the record straight on. This is the core point of dispute, and the author just blazes past it to focus on other things. I'm glad to hear "stochastic parrot" isn't intended as an insult, and I agree that it's not right to think of LLMs as a box with a little homunculus inside replying to you. But to me it seems obvious that LLMs are not repeating patterns without comprehension and do understand what they are saying; otherwise they would not be capable of doing things they routinely do.

by SpicyLemonZest

7/6/2026 at 3:45:39 PM

I think it’s pretty clear that they are repeating without “comprehension” - both mechanistically (as in there is no facility for comprehension in their formulation) and in the ways they fail. The standard rs in strawberry, should I walk or drive to the car wash, etc all play on the fact that they don’t have any real world model or thoughts against which they can judge their output, as do many of the jailbreaks which basically play on the fact that the model has memorized patterns.

There are people who argue semantics, that we can call the pattern matching that LLMs do “understanding”, or the moronic “how do we know that’s isn’t all we do” but for the normal use of comprehension, LLMs at a fundamental level don’t.

by andy99

7/6/2026 at 7:52:19 PM

> should I walk or drive to the car wash

there is an entire genre of riddles based on this kind of misdirection that works on humans, such as "A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors?"

As with humans, comprehension is not a binary property of the agent - it is a quality that can be present in some situations and absent in others. LLMs may emit correct outputs sometimes because they do comprehend the input, and emit incorrect outputs in other cases when they do not comprehend the input.

In order to show that LLMs can't comprehend, we'd have to show that there are no (or at least very few) situations in which they exhibit comprehension, not show that there are some situations in which they don't.

by emtel

7/6/2026 at 3:40:39 PM

> But to me it seems obvious that LLMs are not repeating patterns without comprehension and do understand what they are saying; otherwise they would not be capable of doing things they routinely do.

So this seems obvious to you, and yet to many others, it is equally obvious that LLMs can/could do the things they routinely do without any meaningful sense of "understanding".

by PaulDavisThe1st

7/6/2026 at 4:44:20 PM

I think it's a mistake to disentangle their abilities from understanding. Just swallow the pill that they have some form of understanding, even if it slightly differs from ours. I really don't see the problem.

by naasking

7/6/2026 at 5:20:46 PM

I prefer to work the other way around. That is, accept that a lot of human speech (and text) is generated via similar mechanisms to the ones that drive LLMs, but note that there is another kind of behavior - reasoning - which seems to be distinct.

by PaulDavisThe1st

7/6/2026 at 6:21:55 PM

I think you need understanding to reason, but you don't need reasoning to understand. A child understands how to catch a ball without reasoning about forces, air resistance, gravity, etc.

I think LLMs understand without reasoning. They've built a large associative network of concepts (a kind of understanding), but we don't yet have a good handle on the process of reasoning using that network.

by naasking

7/6/2026 at 6:52:12 PM

I don't think it is useful to say that a child "understands how to catch a ball", even though it is something many of us do say quite often.

The child knows how to catch the ball, without understanding. Later, the child learns both reason and physics, and can reason about ball catching in a different way.

I don't think that it is useful to say that LLMs understand anything they say, or that we say to them.

by PaulDavisThe1st

7/6/2026 at 3:51:17 PM

> But to me it seems obvious that LLMs are not repeating patterns without comprehension and do understand what they are saying; otherwise they would not be capable of doing things they routinely do.

Is it possible you're making the following error described in the article?

> The fact that these systems are designed to mimic the way we use language makes it very easy for people to mistake them for other people.

Clearly you don't believe it's actually a person ("it's not right to think of LLMs as a box with a little homunculus inside replying to you"), but you do believe it's doing something a little bit magical. Is it possible because the interface is linguistic, and every other thing in your world that communicates with language is intelligent, that you're projecting something that just isn't there onto the situation?

I'm sorry if this line of questioning is a little invasive. But this is literally the "danger" the original paper talks about, and it seems an awful lot like you've fallen for it.

by 27183

7/6/2026 at 4:43:12 PM

I'm not offended by the line of questioning! But I don't really follow it. I don't and IIUC Bender doesn't use "understanding" to refer to any kind of magical property. Understanding is the capability of using words as consistent handles to things in the exterior world which the language is describing. And this is something LLMs can clearly do. I just went to ChatGPT and asked this question, which is almost surely not in its training data:

> What would happen if I walked to the top of a skyscraper with a soda can full of Maraschino cherries and let them go?

And its answer (https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a4bd9ffa5708191901bb6d43c89f43b) clearly demonstrates understanding. It knew that this is a dangerous thing I should not do in real life, and that my question is ambiguous about whether I intend to drop the can, and that this might be intended as a physics problem rather than a real life scenario.

by SpicyLemonZest

7/6/2026 at 5:03:17 PM

> And this is something LLMs can clearly do.

...

> It knew that this is a dangerous thing I should not do in real life

From the ChatGPT response you linked, all I see for sure is some matches on the following patterns:

  drop $thing from skyscraper --> bad behavior
  drop $thing --> physics
  can of $stuff --> contents in/out of can

Then there are some sentences of likely characters following those patterns. You don't need anything more than a basic cartoon-level understanding of how an LLM works to explain this output. I see no evidence of reasoning or understanding here, or any theory of "real life".

It also does an incredibly poor job of answering your question. It makes no attempt to explain what might actually happen. If it has been trained on the entire corpus of medical science, and it is indeed intelligent, then surely it can reference ballistics studies and give you a very detailed and thorough theory of what--exactly--injuries you might expect from a 12oz can being dropped from the height of a skyscraper. Calculating the terminal velocity and therefore the momentum of the can is trivial. Characterizing the physics of the impact on various parts of a human body is trivial. If it actually understood your request why didn't it just answer the question?

It's a rhetorical question. LLMs do not "understand". It is completely outside their capability. "Understanding" is something we impose upon their output (to loosely quote TFA). [edit] I think the most powerful evidence for a lack of any understanding whatsoever is all the stuff about the cherries being in or out of the can. Yes, cans contain things. That is not a profound observation, nor is it at all relevant to the question. If you drop an empty can off a skyscraper nothing meaningful will happen. And, no, probably dumping all the cherries out won't hurt anyone or cause a slipping hazard... It's also not particularly relevant to point out that dropping things off skyscrapers is bad behavior. But that's more forgivable from a CYA standpoint.

I believe you are projecting something that is not there onto a completely mindless stochastic process.

[another edit] I found this helpful, you may also: https://www.0xkato.xyz/how-llms-actually-work/

by 27183

7/6/2026 at 8:56:15 PM

I'll have to think more about this. Your last point feels somewhat persuasive to me, I'm at least a lot less confident in this than I was.

by SpicyLemonZest

7/6/2026 at 3:51:26 PM

But it shouldn't even be contentious like that. It's not a fundamental mystery how these things work. It is for the most part not a valid target for the kind of speculation you seem to want to do about it.

It's not like you can be agnostic, or measured about this. It's like someone explaining a car to you, saying, "look here is where you put the fuel, here is where it ignites, where the axels are turned..." And you, trying to be measured, are like "hm well yes of course that all is clearly important, but there is clearly just a bit of magic here somewhere, between all the different 'parts'."

by beepbooptheory

7/6/2026 at 4:20:26 PM

The "magic here somewhere" in the car is in the design that reference aspects of animal anatomy (facial features, stance) and in the millions of dollars of advertising that prime the public with expectations about how they'll feel driving it, or how to see other people in the car. There's a direct connection there to packaging LLMs as chatbots, it gives them a recognizable shape and behavior that a lot of people interpret as consciousness and personality.

by hedgehog

7/6/2026 at 3:38:12 PM

This is a facile point. Lisp expert systems transparently don't understand the meaning of any symbols they process, yet with enough developer elbow grease they can do all the same things an LLM can do, with much higher reliability. The fact that LLMs are less transparent than Lisp expert systems (and easier to program) is extremely bad evidence that they understand language. Especially given that AFAICT Opus does not properly understand concepts like "four."

by Diogenesian

7/6/2026 at 4:42:21 PM

> yet with enough developer elbow grease they can do all the same things an LLM can do, with much higher reliability

Where can I access such a Lisp expert system?

If I cannot because they don't exist: then they cannot do the same things an LLM can do. And of course one can assert anything and everything about what a non-existing thing could do.

by throwaway7356

7/6/2026 at 3:20:22 PM

Five years on, which term do we see as less accurate to describe LLMs? Artificial Intelligence or Stochastic Parrot? I guess it's still an open debate.

by noduerme

7/6/2026 at 3:30:34 PM

Which frame inspires a more productive research program? Which has better predicted the trajectory of capabilities over the past five years?

by scarmig

7/6/2026 at 3:49:00 PM

>Which frame inspires a more productive research program?

This question depends on how you define research productivity. There is close to two hundred AI papers published every weekday. Most of them are about GenAI. Most don't seem to be all thay good. The progress in actual model improvement had mostly stalled. If you interact with the latest "raw" models they display all of the issues we've seen in GPT-3.5, just at a smaller rate. The "amazing gamechanger breakthroughs" I read about on social media every week do not seem to lead anywhere. It's all kind of boring, really.

The new "hotness" in AI is clearly building more and more elaborate harnesses. This is not at all the direction AI boosters have predicted couple years ago.

Personally, I think the "stochastic parrot" mental model is far more useful for science, because it primes people for proper testing, skepticism and researching alternatives. If you want useful AI, you want people working on it being skeptical, not credulous.

by romaniv

7/6/2026 at 3:37:57 PM

There seems to be some confusion between "we can" and "we should" in your comment. Bender (and others) are not discussing the capabilities, but rather (a) the fundamental mechanism(s) (b) the advisability and desirability of deploying systems that use these mechanisms.

by PaulDavisThe1st

7/6/2026 at 3:56:52 PM

There's no statement one way or another about should in my comment; and, for what it's worth, my ideal would be an immediate global pause in AI research and development.

But the different terms imply different mental models of what LLMs are and can do. If you take two people, one who thinks of them as "artificial intelligence" and one as "stochastic parrots" (with all the implicit context and connotations of the individual words composing them), what mental model would have led to better predictions of LLMs' future circa 2020?

The "stochastic parrots" phrase is very dangerous in that frame. People read far more into what capabilities it implies are (im)possible than the narrow technical description the authors originally argued for. If all they are is spicy autocomplete or pastiche plagiarizers, there's nothing serious to worry about. And when an opposition gets stuck in a trough that mindlessly dismisses their future capabilities out of hand because of a bad mental model, it renders them ineffective at preventing the worst outcomes.

by scarmig

7/6/2026 at 3:50:10 PM

Statistical models have repeatedly shown themselves to be the most productive research method for working with complex human-based systems (and in the larger study of natural phenomena). It remains unclear whether there is any short term path for symbolic methods to catch up and exceed the capabilities of current/near-future statistical systems.

To me the real question begins only once we have a clear example of a non-trivial scientific discovery that is implicit (IE, not an obvious outcome of reading the literature and talking to the experts) and experimentally verifiable. Once that happens- especially if it is a reproducible process (IE, more discoveries) and it's significant (IE, impacts human life and mind in some profound way)- then the onus very much lies on Bender and her coauthors to explain whether we need more than a sufficiently advanced stochastic parrot.

by dekhn

7/6/2026 at 3:46:18 PM

> Which has better predicted the trajectory of capabilities over the past five years?

By that standard, parrots, and it's not even close. The framing of intelligence led to an enormous number of predictions that simply haven't been realised: an end to all white collar work, UBI, a total revolution in society, a literal robot god.

People are so desperate to view 'stochastic parrots' as dismissive that they misread the original argument while quickly ignoring all the failed predictions about how AI was going to overturn, save, and destroy everything.

by Planktonne

7/6/2026 at 3:28:59 PM

The latter is definitely more colorful, and reflects a parrot's tendency to glom on to patterns. "Not X, but Y" being one of the more infamous ones.

Once in frustration I called a certain frontier model "Sam Altman's Tin Bird" to another agent with memory, and ever since then that other agent refers to ChatGPT as "the tin bird". Definitely a RAG artifact more than an attractor in that case, but I found it amusing.

by snerbles

7/6/2026 at 3:27:32 PM

Though, I would point out that where people fall on that seems to correlate very highly with their ability to explain how an attention head works.

by bunderbunder

7/6/2026 at 3:50:21 PM

Which direction is the correlation?

I don’t think this phrase means what people assume when it’s applied to post trained instruct models - which did not exist when the paper was written.

After RL it is not predicting based on samples of the original corpus - but is also chasing a reward function that does require other features.

There has been a lot of subsequent research that really calls many of the statements in this article into question.

by jeremyjh

7/6/2026 at 3:29:53 PM

Explain it to me

by beardedwizard

7/6/2026 at 3:55:00 PM

This is a false dichotomy. Artificial Intelligence is more of a marketing term type of Hi-Fi or High Definition, ie. being a “suitcase word”[1], ie. it packs various different meanings and phenomena together to the point that without explication one cannot know what we are even talking about. Content recommendation system and LLM are completely different things.

What professor Bender is trying to explain here is that they were trying to describe how the LLM’s actually operate, to which point stochastic parrots is a fairly decent term. It is only disparaging if you know absolutely nothing how LLM’s work or you have some strange affixation to chatbots and believing they are far more capable than they actually are.

[1] Coined by Marvin Minsky: https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/consciousness-is-a-big-su...

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 3:39:15 PM

I think "(intelligent) language understander" is an apt term. It contains within it the fact that these models are mainly trained on text, and "understand" it beyond a simple token-by-token level (i.e. their latent space maps to more and more complex concepts).

It also separates them from "world understanders" since any understanding they might have about the world comes from text (or images if we include multimodal models). They do not gather experience, memories or other "qualia" that many people (me included) would probably include in a definition of human experience/intelligence.

(fwiw i think artificial intelligence is a good, broad term, but it is both too broad to describe the current sota, and too loaded nowadays to be using in nuanced discussions)

by fxwin

7/6/2026 at 3:50:11 PM

Understand is a pretty imprecise term. What does it mean for a computer to understand? Does an H264 decoder understand Eraserhead.mkv?

by xgulfie

7/6/2026 at 3:29:42 PM

What's wrong with "large language model"?

by dkdbejwi383

7/6/2026 at 6:37:15 PM

Naming things using qualifiers like "large" has never aged well when transistors were involved.

For example, consider the term "short wave" radio which refers to wavelengths of at least 10 meters. Today's mobile communications use wavelengths 100x - 10,000x shorter.

by marshray

7/6/2026 at 3:37:10 PM

Seems like a lot of people are upset about other people calling both apples and oranges “fruit”.

by cwillu

7/6/2026 at 3:27:52 PM

Its less of open debate would say, and although superposition [1] is interesting, as a way to explain power of some effects, it is clear they are right now closer to Stochastic Parrots than AGI.

Why do I say that? Because you can trivially beat most guardrails, simply by encoding your prompt in base64 for example. :-) Just word matching...no real understanding.

[1] https://chrisclay.substack.com/p/what-is-superposition-in-ne...

by root-parent

7/6/2026 at 6:41:31 PM

What is "real understanding", and what question can we ask ChatGPT to determine whether it has it?

by marshray

7/6/2026 at 9:15:12 PM

Ask it how to prevent Spotify from automatically playing every time you get in your car. The answer will involve a bunch of Android settings that don't actually exist, cobbled together from a bunch of bad advice in online forums. Explain to it how it's wrong. Then clear your cache and ask it the same question again from scratch, and get the same garbage. Repeat until it's clear that it doesn't understand anything.

by noduerme

7/6/2026 at 3:30:56 PM

Spicy autocomplete

by amiga386

7/6/2026 at 3:40:36 PM

> Stochastic Parrot

Nearly all (99%+) people who use this phrase are anti-AI and just looking to show off how much they dislike AI and how clever they can be in insulting it.

So it's a great phrase because in just about every case I can ignore what someone says afterwards.

Similar to "glorified autocomplete."

by paulcole

7/6/2026 at 3:50:17 PM

At least "glorified autocomplete" is technically accurate, even if vastly underestimating the capability of LLMs. It's just trying to make something very impressive sound trivial.

From an external standpoint, talking to another human, it's like the other human says one word and then says the next word. That's just how language works. Humans look like "glorified autocomplete" from this perspective.

I mean, looking at the time evolution of the state of the universe, one could say that all of physics and creation is "glorified autocomplete" to posit a next state of the universe given current and past state.

by andrewla

7/6/2026 at 4:04:35 PM

That’s not how language works https://www.telelib.com/authors/J/JoyceJames/prose/finnegans...

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 4:22:26 PM

I dunno, man, I looked at that text and I see one word after another.

Obviously language and the connection to human thought is more subtle than this; I think we all have a rich inner life. Just from an external perspective we can't observe it; all we can see is the token/phoneme stream. I'm just saying that it's a mistake to try to criticize LLMs on this basis because it's hard to see how the same criticism would not apply to any system (like humans) that generate language.

by andrewla

7/6/2026 at 5:18:15 PM

If you want to see words form a shape I could point you towards concrete poetry, but I guess there is no point. Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake for 17 years and although superficially it seems complete gibberish, trodding through it you find meaning to words that are in no dictionary, sentence structures alien to English, etc. but still you are able to understand it, and perhaps some way the mind that produced it. So I disagree with you, we can observe each other’s inner life. It is always unexpected, strange, exciting, but always rooted to our shared experience or what it like being a very big and confused ape.

LLM’s are usually unexpected only when they malfunction and sprout same letter again and again etc - hardly a literary masterpiece. They make very easily recognisable patterns that we can use as helpful tools, but in the end they are devoid of any meaning apart from what we give them. Of course one could say same about art and all language, but I think there still is the fact that we apes somehow recognise each other. And besides, we do know the internal functions that drive the parroting. It is admittedly bit tricky, but in no way as magical as people purport it to be.

by delis-thumbs-7e

7/6/2026 at 7:02:13 PM

Oh, now I see where we have an actual difference of opinion. I don't think you can deny that even Finnegan's wake proceeds one token at a time; your interpretation of it may require more context or out-of-order interpretation, but that's just as true when observing text in German or Japanese, which have word ordering constraints that are alien to English speakers. How it was written is irrelevant; all we can observe is how it was presented. Of course we can observe each other's inner life, but we do so one token at a time, even if the process of producing each token is done (internally or actively) via a backtracking or zeitgeist approach.

You seem to believe, on a more fundamental level, that LLMs are simply not capable of producing text that has deeper connections to itself or represents abstract thoughts. In my opinion, 99% of text written by humans does not show this, just as 99% of text produced by LLMs does not show this, but both have the capability, and I don't believe that LLMs are constrained in such a way that they can never do this.

by andrewla

7/6/2026 at 4:02:44 PM

> one could say that all of physics and creation is "glorified autocomplete"

Exhibit A.

by paulcole

7/6/2026 at 3:22:11 PM

Pattern matching machines seems more appropriate.

by DanielHB

7/6/2026 at 3:24:42 PM

For humans?

by diego_sandoval

7/6/2026 at 3:27:59 PM

LLMs do not match patterns. They predict one statistically most likely token (only one!) given a history of some N previously known tokens.

by otabdeveloper4

7/6/2026 at 3:30:47 PM

Is that prediction not based on matching previous patterns, whose frequencies are more or less encoded in the weights?

by beardedwizard

7/6/2026 at 3:39:43 PM

you're really reaching for no apparent reason. Just move on from pattern matching machines it's not a good mental model for LLMs

by snapcaster

7/6/2026 at 3:42:36 PM

> statistically most likely

Isn't that pattern matching essentially?

by lioeters

7/6/2026 at 3:34:20 PM

afaik before the final sampling, every "next" token has a probability, so theoretically it could select the 10 most likely tokens (based on some kind of sampling algorithm), but you'd end up with exponentially many output-sequences, so nobody does that.

by lennoff

7/6/2026 at 3:46:33 PM

I think the point the poster above was making is that it doesn't predict a phrase or anything like that - just the single next token. So all 10 or 1000 or whatever number of tokens you want are each individually candidates for the single next token, not a sequence of 10 or 100 next tokens. If you wanted to create multiple possible seuqneces, you'd then feed each of the 10 tokens to the network in the initial state, and extract the next token (or 10 next tokens) from that one, than revert back and feed another single one of the 10 tokens, etc.

by tsimionescu

7/6/2026 at 3:42:58 PM

For context, here's the main quote:

> Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.

I think this metaphor is so strained as to not be useful. I think key here is that the authors say "without any reference to meaning", which is a heavily loaded term, that does definitely apply to parrots, but does not apply when you apply it to immense bodies of text.

Namely that language embeds meaning in language. A sentence being written by a human (as a starting point) is designed to have consistent meaning. While it is possible to write syntactically correct meaningless text, that is not what most of human language has done; the meaning cannot be removed from the text.

This I think is clarifying, from the same paragraph in the text:

> ... the training data never included sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that.

That's just facially incorrect. The training data is entirely about sharing thoughts with a listener. Else why is the text being written?

by andrewla

7/6/2026 at 4:11:59 PM

I don't accept that it applies to parrots. Certainly not to Congo African Grey parrots.

by SAI_Peregrinus

7/6/2026 at 3:37:13 PM

What I have been doing in many places—the octopus thought experiment, stochastic parrots, the phrase “synthetic text-extruding machines”—it’s all about trying to make vivid to people who aren’t in the business of building language technology what these systems actually do

> Meanwhile, O, a hyper-intelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially, but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances. O also observes that certain words tend to occur in similar contexts, and perhaps learns to generalize across lexical patterns by hypothesizing that they can be used somewhat interchangeably. Nonetheless, Ohas never observed these objects, and thus would not be able to pick out the referent of a word when presented with a set of (physical) alternatives.

This seems kind of obviously wrong at least in the context of coding agents. These models get trained on actual output of the previous version of the model doing its job, often "IRL" on a real computer/project. It's like O is in the conversation for years now and learning from his own interactions between A <-> O <-> B, where A is the human and B is the computer.

The idea O ontologically has never "observed" "these objects" or referents is philosophically strained. Have I observed the moon, or a finger pointing at the moon? Have I observed `sed` more than Fable?

by themgt

7/6/2026 at 3:33:44 PM

I think this is the most measured take I've seen from Bender, and I think it summarizes her only compelling point well (technologies should be referred to specifically rather than generally as AI, and that referring to everything as AI is not useful and helps hype the technology in a way that benefits those selling it).

In her previous interviews, I've found her assertion that LLMs aren't useful and will never be good at anything totally uncompelling. Also laughed at this quote as she's been pretty harsh IMO on "the people who like the systems".

> it’s all about trying to make vivid to people who aren’t in the business of building language technology what these systems actually do, which is not the same thing as insulting the systems or insulting the people who like the systems.

by petergs

7/6/2026 at 3:45:13 PM

After having used LLMs for some time now, I don't agree with the concept they are just token generators, unless you think that's all humans are too. The way we test in most schools is just picking the right token. We also give them unique problems that they never saw in their training, which is the nature of programming. I realize they are probabilistic token generator models, but I find it harder and harder to accept that somehow there isn't something more going on. I'm not sure whether they are intelligent or not, but for the most part token generation is how you get degrees too. The thing is a parrot just says things it has already heard, it doesn't perform complex reasoning on novel situations and then explain it succinctly.

by NyxWulf

7/6/2026 at 3:47:49 PM

They are just token generators. It is just that 'just' does a lot of lifting!

by gpderetta

7/6/2026 at 3:54:47 PM

Here's the thing: most things people do does not involve tokens of any kind. It is, in fact, stuff that not easily describable. For example, it's trivial for a person to walk, but they cannot verbally describe what muscles they're activating in what order to make that happen.

Cognitive skills such as tool use and complex navigation predate language as well. That means there's a core of reasoning in humans that doesn't depend on "tokens" or "language" of any kind. Language is a tool for communication and forming complex human societies, but it's not cognition.

> The thing is a parrot just says things it has already heard, it doesn't perform complex reasoning on novel situations and then explain it succinctly.

Well a parrot does perform complex reasoning on novel situations all the time. It just doesn't have the wiring to connect that to "tokenized" human language. I suspect LLMs have the opposite problem, where they exist in the domain of their "tokens" and have no way to connect these to truly novel situations that have no existing words to describe them.

by AlexandrB