A bit offtopic, but it's funny how people call parrots/birds "extremely intelligent" and AI/LLMs "just stochastic parrots devoid of any intelligence", even though their capabilities are very obviously far more like the inverse of those qualifications (show me a video where someone has even a basic extended back and forth conversation with a bird).

There is a pretty clear double standard there.

Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion 'forebrain' neurons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the total would be 1 trillion synapses.

If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses, then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.

I think it's a difference in expectation. For some reason, people are surprised that birds have the same intelligence level as a human toddler. However no one wants an AI assistant that's as dumb as a toddler.

uh.. AI/LLMs were created to be smart, and they sometimes meet that expectation. We did not create parrots, we just get surprised when they show off intelligence

> How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood.

One factor is neuron size. Bird neurons are around 0.4 the length of mammalian neurons, so you can pack in around 8 times the neurons in a given volume.

A large parrot has the same number of neurons as a medium sized dog.

That was great, thank you for sharing.

If you liked that story, you should really read the full anthology, called Exhalation. Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and there are a lot of great stories in that book. I think my favorite was The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.

Yes indeed. Merchant ... was such a delightful story.

Pleasure's all mine. It's one of my favourite short stories.