Lexical Compendium

Wait... what is this? Sometimes I come across a word, phrase, idiom, quote, reference, bit of slang, person of interest, etc that either I don't know or I find amusing, interesting, etc. This is a collection of those items so that I can refer back to them in emails, texts, etc.

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AGI

AGI stands for "Artificial General Intelligence." Unlike AI, AGI is meant to connote a system that exhibits human-like intelligence and is not trained for specific tasks.

Related: ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence), ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence), p(doom)


(link to this entry)

References:

  1. Wikipedia: Artificial General Intelligence
  2. YouTube: Wozniak: Could a Computer Make a Cup of Coffee? - Steve Wozniak talks pontificates about a computer being smart enough to make a cup of coffee in a random person's home; something that would take a lot of "general" intelligence.

Tags: ai, computer-science

Date Added: 23 Jun 2024
Date Modified: 27 Jun 2024

p(doom)

p(doom) stands for "probability of doom" and is a term used when talking about AGI.


(link to this entry)

References:

  1. Wikipedia: p(doom)
  2. NYT: Silicon Valley Confronts a Grim New A.I. Metric
  3. Fast Company: P(doom) is AI’s latest apocalypse metric. Here’s how to calculate your score

Tags: ai, computer-science

Date Added: 27 Jun 2024

stochastic parrot

Stochastic parrot is a term coined by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. in a 2021 paper on the ethical risks of large language models called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜."

It refers to how large language models generate text by probabilistically predicting the next word based on patterns learned from massive datasets, rather than understanding or reasoning like a human. The metaphor highlights how such systems mimic language without genuine comprehension.

In December 2022, shortly after ChatGPT was released, Sam Altman of OpenAI tweeted, "i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u."

Stochastic parrot was a 2023 American Dialect Society "Word of the Year."


(link to this entry)

References:

  1. Wikipedia: Stochastic parrot
  2. WSJ: ‘Stochastic Parrot’: A Name for AI That Sounds a Bit Less Intelligent
  3. American Dialect Society: 2023 Words of the Year
  4. Tweet: @sama 04 Dec 2022
  5. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 - 2021, Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al.

Tags: vocabulary, ai, computer_science

Date Added: 28 Jan 2025