You’re confused about what “statistical parrot” means and you don’t seem to understand the difference between an optimization objective and the resulting model.
The term “parrot” is used to imply inference by something akin to a look-up table, specifically it is used to indicate poor out-of-sample performance and a lack of a proper world model. The optimization objective is irrelevant when determining the generalization performance of a model and when judging whether it can reason beyond looking up answers in a table.
As the user above noted, it is now quite well established that GPT-4 has impressive out-of-sample performance which can be explained by it possessing an actual model of the world and not being a “parrot”.
The term “parrot” is used to imply inference by something akin to a look-up table, specifically it is used to indicate poor out-of-sample performance and a lack of a proper world model. The optimization objective is irrelevant when determining the generalization performance of a model and when judging whether it can reason beyond looking up answers in a table.
As the user above noted, it is now quite well established that GPT-4 has impressive out-of-sample performance which can be explained by it possessing an actual model of the world and not being a “parrot”.