Melanie Mitchell backs claim that today's systems aren't really LLMs, citing original definition
MelMitchell1 · x · 2026-09-27
Santa Fe Institute professor Melanie Mitchell responded to Aidan Clark's claim that "what we have now are not LLMs," agreeing unless the term has been redefined. She argued the Stochastic Parrots paper used the original definition: a language model is a statistical model of language, not of all the extra content today's post-trained AI systems have absorbed. The exchange feeds into an ongoing debate about how far the LLM label has drifted from its technical meaning.
Related event: Melanie Mitchell Sparks Debate: Today's Systems Are Not LLMs(31 posts)→
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