alt Hacker NewsShe says explicitly it's not an empirical hypothesis. It's just a label for how they function. Which hasn't really changed even as they've gotten more useful. I haven't followed the full drama but this post is her saying the term has been frequently misapplied and she's basically distancing herself from some critiques that were misinterpreting her intent.
> She says explicitly it's not an empirical hypothesis. It's just a label for how they function.
Then… what’s the point of the label, if it’s not making any empirically-meaningful claims about LLMs at all? I know that LLMs involve sampling over a distribution of output logits. I’ve written code to do it. So what? I know they have statistical elements. Yet I don’t go around calling LLMs stochastic parrots, because that label implies a whole lot of claims about LLMs that I don’t think are true any longer, like that they are just regurgitating and remixing training data and can’t successfully model structured systems (like mathematics or programming).