Jack Clark: 'stochastic parrot' was a cognitive virus that blinded elites for years
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-09-20
OpenAI co-founder Jack Clark argues that "stochastic parrot" was a mimetically-fit cognitive virus that spread from 2021-2025, temporarily blinding many gifted people to the nature of AI progress and burning years they could have spent thinking through the response.
Richard Ngo adds that people who bought the framing rarely make solid conceptual progress on thorny topics — cutting through to the intellectual frontier requires the same mental moves as breaking out of dumb social consensuses.
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