Jack Clark: the "stochastic parrot" meme blinded experts to AI progress for years
gerardsans · x · 2026-09-21
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark argues the "stochastic parrot" phrase was a mimetically fit cognitive virus that spread from 2021-2025, temporarily blinding gifted people to the nature of AI progress and burning crucial years. Commenters pushed back, calling it an honest description of the transformer architecture and criticizing safety theatre, naive anthropomorphism, and projecting personhood onto matrix multiplication — a snapshot of the ongoing debate over what models really are.
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