Jeremiah

This simple analogy is slightly off, because it's confusing two optimization levels.

The outer optimization level, in humans, evolution optimizing for reproduction, in AI's, companies optimizing for profit, with the inner optimization level, in humans, next-sense-dartum prediction, in AI's, next-token prediction.

But the stochastic parrot people probably haven't gotten to the point where they learn that humans are next-sense-dartum predictors,

so the evolution-slash-reproduction one above might make a better didactic tool.

Below these prediction algorithms optimizing for various things are all the structures, algorithms, world models, and thought processes they've created.

In both humans and AIs, these look like good, normal thinking.

You do math by remembering PEMDAS and carrying the one.

You deal with angry tigers by remembering principles like tigers like to pounce, and when an animal pounces, its actions will follow the laws of physics, which I intuitively approximate as X, Y, and Z. Below these intuitive processes are bizarre low-level algorithms involving helices and toroids.

These are approximately equally creepy in humans and AIs, which makes sense because they were designed by the same inhuman process, next sense datum or next token prediction, and operate on similar materials, neural tissue, weights connected by parameters.

Nothing about any of these levels of explanations supports a contention like humans are doing real thought, but AIs are simply next token predictors.

There will be some algorithmic differences, and some of those might be important, and we can talk about their implications, but they're downstream of what specific prediction tasks each entity was trained on and what strengths and weaknesses their own evolutionary history gives them.

The stochastic parrot people have many other arguments involving hallucinations, the differences between tokens and sense data, etc.

I'm hoping to combine all my writing on this into an anti-stochastic parrot FAQ, so don't worry if I don't immediately rebut all of them in this post.

Thank you for listening, and I'll speak to you next time.

Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 12th of February, 2026.

Title, What Happened With Bio-Anchors?

This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack.

If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com.

The original post was Biological Anchors, A Trick That Might or Might Not Work.

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