I’d argue that all these models are stochastic parrots because they’re not embodied in any way. There is no way they can actually understand what they are talking about in any way that is tied back to the physical world.
What these LLMs and diffusion models and such actually are is a lossy compression method that permits structural queries. The fact that they can learn structure as well as content allows them to reason as well, but only to the extent that the rules they’re following existed somewhere in the training data and its structure.
If one were given access to senses and memory and feedback mechanisms and learned language that way, it might be considered actually intelligent or even sentient if it exhibited autonomy and value judgments.
What these LLMs and diffusion models and such actually are is a lossy compression method that permits structural queries. The fact that they can learn structure as well as content allows them to reason as well, but only to the extent that the rules they’re following existed somewhere in the training data and its structure.
If one were given access to senses and memory and feedback mechanisms and learned language that way, it might be considered actually intelligent or even sentient if it exhibited autonomy and value judgments.