#llm

Wikipedia overview of the "stochastic parrot" metaphor, coined in a 2021 AI ethics paper by Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, and colleagues, which frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without genuine understanding. Covers the Gebru–Google firing controversy and the ongoing debate between skeptics and researchers like Geoffrey Hinton who argue understanding emerges from prediction at scale.

Applies Jevons Paradox to AI inference — per-token costs dropped 1000x since 2022 but total spend is up 10x because usage exploded. The key insight is that agent costs grow quadratically with turns, not linearly, because each step feeds the full conversation history back as context.

Hadley Wickham builds up the definition of an agent from first principles — conversations, turns, tools, harnesses — landing on "an LLM in a harness that calls tools repeatedly in a loop." A clear technical explainer for a term that's everywhere but rarely unpacked.

Great bottom-up explainer. Hadley's definition ("LLM in a harness, calling tools in a loop") is more detailed than Simon Willison's earlier "runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal" (https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/agents/) — interesting to see how the concept has accumulated vocabulary as the field matures.

Hadley Wickham refines the agent definition by clarifying that tools run in the harness, not the model — and uses math as the concrete example. LLMs are confidently wrong at arithmetic, but harnesses can supply a calculator tool. Also covers how web chat harnesses quietly provide web search, page fetch, memory, and image generation.

Simon Willison's commentary on an Axios piece — the best behind-the-scenes account of the US government export control story that took Fable and Mythos offline.

Hadley Wickham demystifies coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) by building a minimal one in R with ellmer. The core is just six tools — read file, write file, edit file, list files, search, run command — plus a system prompt. Also covers path safety and why a targeted edit tool beats full file rewrites.