Gary Marcus: stop conflating 2022 'stochastic parrots' with 2026 neurosymbolic systems
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-10-12
Gary Marcus called out @rohanpaulai's claim as misleading, arguing we need a name for people who conflate 2022-era pure LLMs — which were to some degree 'stochastic parrots' — with 2026 systems that couple LLMs with symbolic harnesses, code interpreters, and symbolic verification.
He says the conflation is both unfair to the people who coined the metaphor for the technology of its time, and disrespectful to the subsequent innovations and the critical contributions of neurosymbolic AI. He laments that on X many talk about AI but few take the time to actually understand it.
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