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Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

dank.systems

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Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#511
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with the models isn't that they play a bad game, but that they persist in making illegal moves. An average intelligent human can be told the rules of chess and then play chess, badly, within the rules.

An average human would have a physical chess board in front of them to remind them of the current state.

Sure, but the LLM is free to construct a representation of the chess board and update it as it goes along. It is not in any way banned from using a virtual board, or whatever representation of game state it pleases.

AFAIK, current models will still sometimes make illegal moves even if given the entire game state (e.g. in FEN notation), so it is not purely an issue with the models’ ability to keep track of sequences of moves.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe watch some HuskIRL videos to temper your expectations. Sure, frontier models providers may alter their harnesses to better target chess, but that’s lipstick on a pig imo. The models themselves are not, in isolation, capable of solving general tasks. We haven’t modeled intelligence sufficiently. We’re in a local minimum and throwing billions of dollars at a gamble that that local minimum can facilitate the conce…

I've seen some of his videos, and got the impression he didn't understand how GPT-Live delegates to the more powerful regular model with reasoning. The regular model generally does not suffer the same issues he is demonstrating with the real time audio version. In my view the investment into datacenters is well justified by the current demand, and progress has been very impressive.

Really? It was being sold as a total replacement for jobs like software engineering and being an attorney, but its looking a lot more that its just going to be a tool those professions use and doesn't actually seem to be taking jobs away.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#513

This is the most grounded and coherent take I’ve seen on the actual realizable value of LLMs.. pretty much since they came out. > the classes of firms that can accept the use of fully autonomous LLMs are few, by my count just three: 1. those who can accept failure cheaply: firms that would otherwise hire interns, firms involved in rapid prototyping work, etc. 2. those who need done a small set of narrowly defined tas…

[flagged]

Uhhh what?

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#514
post #479

Great article, but the lack of sentence capitalization makes it unnecessarily difficult to read. Apologies if this comment is off-topic, but it really is quite egregious, and since the article was submitted by the author I presume they are open to the feedback.

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. I've added an orthography toggle for those who prefer a more conventional look. I will add that I'm not very happy with the readability of my site overall at the moment; if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!

Thanks!

To expand a bit: It's clear from the writing that the formatting is an intentional stylistic choice. My point wasn't about aesthetic preference. I meant precisely what I wrote. Language evolves and orthography evolves. We've been capitalizing less and less for centuries now. But (until very recently) it was a universal rule to capitalize the first letters of sentences. I believe this is partly because (again, until very recently) people read in large quantities and, to a fluent reader, sentence capitalization serves an important purpose: it helps the eye recognize where one sentence ends and the next begins. Periods alone can be easy to miss, or confuse for commas, when the eye is moving quickly.

Anyway, this is all a very minor point. You have a cool site and I enjoyed your article. I hope you keep writing.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask a 6 year old to draw a chess board from scratch every turn and they too will make mistakes.

No one has spent the past three years telling me that a 6 year old will take my job!!!

And the 6 year old doesn't cost more than the GDP of a medium sized country.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gap in capabilities between those models which they tested, and actual current frontier ones is enormous. Same story every 4 months and yet still no breakout, winning products. I've been hearing "the AI is good now" and "it 10x's my productivity" for a over a year now. If it were true, why aren't the all-in-AI using companies 10-15 years ahead of their competition yet? Why is it still all buggy, poorly designed…

I don't get why it is hard to understand there is middle ground. People are 10x their productivity, it isn't all buggy junk, but it isn't all it is hyped up to be either. It isn't that complicated. If you hold the extreme position that there isn't any value in this, that's fine, but we're only having this discussion because these models have done what humans previously failed to do.

I don't think the poster disagrees with you at all. The middle ground is that there are no breakout products and that the models clearly aren't so powerful as to make these companies not produce shit code.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#518

This April 2026 paper is a fun and related read. https://arxiv.org/html/2509.24239v4 Researchers asked frontier models to play chess. Have a look at the MAR rates in Table 3. When not explicitly told which moves were legal, no model identified legal moves at a rate better than 80%. Many asked for more illegal moves than legal moves. And even when explicitly told which moves were legal, the models continued to ask for…

What happens when you ask those same frontier models to write a chess-playing program? I feel like, this is a huge stumbling block that many people have. They'll give a model their data, and ask it questions. I vastly prefer letting the model understand the schema, and then writing functions or programs to answer those questions. I feel like I get way, way better answers. I can have it write unit tests for those func…

Asking a model to "write a throwaway program to do X" is vastly more productive and reliable than asking "do X". Running code provides a feedback loop, the model can iteratively improve the solution instead of guess. Even if you don't read the code yourself, you have a reproducible, editable, and auditable artifact if you need it.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean have you used any coding agents? if you’re getting slop code in 2026, that’s a smell and skill issue. fwiw i was pretty bearish on AI until i spent a month a couple months ago going deep into agentic workflows. use your imagination to solve problems people face and pay $$$ for today that is error prone and hard. i’ve got agentic workflows for the particular industry im building for, one of which that replaces…

Very hard to tell if this is satire. It reads like one of those old r/programmerhumor posts where people competed to come up with the worst designs possible for a volume control. I could not think of a worse technology to use for an ETL pipeline than throwing LLMs at it and asking it to vibe out the correctness of the data every time it runs.

lol. wish it was. fwiw i was pretty much bearish on AI for years because I did go deep into this shit since i got access to GPT 3. but since astra i have been quite bullish.

98% of people think AI means what gemini tells them when they do a google search.

of that 2% who go beyond... maybe 20% of those are using AI to code.

most SWE still think "using AI" to code means the copilot pane they open on the side in VSC. they get sloppy code output and think "ai sucks!"

so of that 20%, maybe 5% have actually explored what an "agentic" workflow even means. they might use skills, set up their code base so AI almost NEVER makes a mistake. maybe 1-5% of that 5% actually went deeper, and those are the people who built tools like Cursor or Harvey or whatever other "agentic" companies.

you are still thinking about the old world where you obsess and define data models and bike shed over data integrity, all the while you have a "temporary" table with 3 attributes that gets 2 million queries per second that's now holding up a bunch of other shit that's also glued together.

> I could not think of a worse technology to use for an ETL pipeline than throwing LLMs at it and asking it to vibe out the correctness of the data every time it runs.

like i said, if you are still having quality issues in 2026, that's a skill gap.

also, agents now continually improve the process.

for a business, the only thing that matters is transaction log. for 99% of businesses, swe are a cost.

again this is like baby steps on the journey. we are still only 3 years into this technology being opened up to masses.

i'm sure people thought computers were dumb, or that cars are stupid because the first cars were moving slow af. "we have horses, why do we need to build out roads to get anywhere"

but you're free to feel smart doing 20/20 hindsight on things 100+ years from the future

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like it played a fully legal game of chess with one exception, it said "rxd1+" (Rook takes D1 with check) instead of "rd1+" (Rook to D1 with check) on move 29. I would say this did a really good job of playing chess. It moved the pieces consistently and traded pieces when required. This is worlds away from the frontier ~1 year ago where models would hallucinate pieces into existence.

You can still see undercurrents of its old self, once I pointed out the illegal notation it hallucinated prior illegal moves. But I agree, it's leagues apart from prior iterations. It also knew thematic moves in the opening. But whenever it needs to play concretely rather than "I know so-and-so is a good move in these types of positions" it crumbles.

Agreed, move selection was not great. Notably, it should not have allowed nxe7+.

However, the pawn was defended by the queen and it took a forced queen trade to unlock the move.

I have seen much worse blunders from human players. And, I have made much worse blunders.

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