Frankly I'm tired of metaphor-based attempts to explain LLMs.

Stochastic Parrots. Interns. Junior Devs. Thought partners. Bicycles for the mind. Spicy autocomplete. A blurry jpeg of the web. Calculators but for words. Copilot. The term "artificial intelligence" itself.

These may correspond to a greater or lesser degree with what LLMs are capable of, but if we stick to metaphors as our primary tool for reasoning about these machines, we're hamstringing ourselves and making it impossible to reason about the frontier of capabilities, or resolve disagreements about them.

A understanding-without-metaphors isn't easy -- it requires a grasp of math, computer science, linguistics and philosophy.

But if we're going to move forward instead of just finding slightly more useful tropes, we have to do it. Or at least to try.