It’s time to retire the ‘stochastic parrot’ definition of AI

Thinking of frontier AI models as glorified autocorrect could give a false sense of security during discussions about the serious risks these models pose.

[Source images: Adobe Stock]

Early generative AI models, circa 2017-2022, were “stochastic parrots.” That is, they generated language by choosing the statistically most likely next word based on patterns in their training data, rather than truly understanding what they were saying.

Beginning in 2023, artificial intelligence labs began releasing large language models (LLMs) that had evolved beyond autoregressive next-token prediction, as researchers call it.

For many people, the stochastic parrot definition stuck. And lately, the “they’re just stochastic parrots” argument has been used as a way of downplaying the potential risks of huge language models such as OpenAI’s Astra models or........

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