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

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

#531

Post by 0c3ca83 »

vector_spaces wrote: post #521
0c3ca83 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think judgement is impossible to automate? What aspects of it do you think make it hard?

Judgments are not generally impossible to automate -- judgements are typically binary or quantifiable interpretations, so in some sense are perfect targets for automation, but the sheer volume of judgements needed to build something coherent is overly cumbersome to specify to the point of being intractable. There are also many hidden judgements, ones where the thresholds may not be well understood, and interactions b…

Taste is just a set of statistically expressible heuristics for what other people will think is good. I don't undestand why you think this is impossible for AI to do.

It feels like today, taste in design is similar to where software engineering was about a year ago.

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

#532

Post by diehunde »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #340
zahlman wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we humans are not a general intelligence then? No, because we can , in fact, generally read the rules of a game and then follow them. It's actually a hobby for many of us. > And the stuff i'm using LLMs daily is just fake? This misses the point completely.

> generally read the rules of a game and then follow them How many times do you think chess.com prevents illegal moves from being executed? Even Super GM's fall for mate-in-1's occasionally, which is functionally equivalent to missing a pin or a check. This idea that LLMs failing to only ever make legal moves undermines their intelligence doesn't pass the smell test.

Do you play chess ? Do you even know what an illegal move is ?

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

#533

Post by dcss_gardener »

cafebeen wrote: post #416
derpyzza wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huh i didn't even notice, that's how i write all my blog posts too. it looks nicer to me and i don't have to bother checking for "proper" capitalization if everything's just lowercase anyway. didn't realize people struggled to read text that way though, maybe i should change my writing style if this is a common pain point

I personally find it slower to read text without capitalization. It helps me visually chunk information from different sentences, in the same way that line breaks separate ideas into different paragraphs. Without it, it’s sort of like a wall of text that I have to read more carefully to parse (although a closer reading perhaps isn’t bad).

A lot of the problem here is that the overall typography on this site is not particularly great. Better leading and tracking, narrower columns, bigger font would go a long way.

If you do everything else right you can skip sentence cap without sacrificing readability. Not that you necessarily should but it's a vibe if you want it, it suits some voices & documents well.

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

#534

Post by hackinthebochs »

diehunde wrote: post #532
hackinthebochs wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generally read the rules of a game and then follow them How many times do you think chess.com prevents illegal moves from being executed? Even Super GM's fall for mate-in-1's occasionally, which is functionally equivalent to missing a pin or a check. This idea that LLMs failing to only ever make legal moves undermines their intelligence doesn't pass the smell test.

Do you play chess ? Do you even know what an illegal move is ?

If you have something to contribute to the discussion, just say it

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

#535

Post by pixl97 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #523
noir_lord wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires general intelligence and we don't even have a good understanding of how our's works or a particularly good way of quantifying it. The counter argument is of course maybe you don't need to understand our kind of intelligence to create a different kind and that could well be true but then how do you determine if a system is intelligent. Unless the new system is intelligent enough to reason with us on our le…

Why do you think it requires general intelligence? The parent and I aren't being obtuse here: the history of artificial intelligence research is littered with examples of humans confidently declaring that task X requires general intelligence, then getting humiliated by a neural network doing task X better than humans a few years later. See Go, driving, art (you can complain about the quality of AI art, but it's winni…

Hence my saying.

We will never prove AI is intelligence.

We'll only prove humans are not.

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

#536

Post by Madmallard »

melvinroest wrote: post #198

Yea I get the bearishness from my own personal experience. Personally, I use LLMs for a lot of things. Oftentimes, I'm a think out loud type of person so even having something that feels like a rubber duck, but more competent, is already amazing for me. And LLMs are a lot more competent than a rubber duck. But especially sometimes I've noticed that LLMs can be unbelievably stupid. It recently happened a few times wit…

Don't see how you can trust the output on matters you don't understand, especially if they're more serious, if you already note instances where they're plainly stupid. You're literally falling for the grift.

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

#537

Post by openfront »

jimmaswell wrote: post #497
plaidfuji wrote: post #463

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…

As a programming lead on a hobbyist video game project, we're reaping massive rewards being in category #1. I keep the architecture and important details in check while letting frontier models go ham. As alluded, it's a video game, not a life support system, so bugs are low-impact. But even better, the defect rate is actually the lowest it's ever been. Insidious bugs baked in by years of accumulated human error are t…

I've found the same, the rate of bugs has dropped pretty dramatically after switching to ai generated code. I think it's partly because ai will write 1000s of lines of unit tests without complaining. I also have a github workflow where claude runs the /code-review command on every PR.

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

#538

Post by geoffschmidt »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #280
linkjuice4all wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State-sponsored psyop meta comments aside, the models obviously continue to get better, but there is still a lot of 'guard railing' required to keep even the latest models completely on-task. The chess example is interesting because it's clearly a well-studied and established domain so the rules, strategies, and whatever else is in the training data should make yield excellent results; but clearly there is some behav…

For me the useful intuition is that LLMs haven't somehow magickally learned to implement any of the algorithms we know that we have used to make strong chess engines: alpha-beta minimax and Monte-Carlo Tree Search on the one hand, and obviously the ability to learn accurate evaluation functions by self-play. I mean we've done all this before in a task-specific fashion. It's useful to know that LLMs haven't managed to…

But they have "learned to implement any of the algorithms we know that we have used to make strong chess engines". Ask Claude Code to write you a chess engine. Your objection is that they don't implement MCTS in the neurons themselves? Neither does a human, we use a C compiler when we want to play chess using MCTS.

That's a separate question from whether an LLM (unaided by a C complier) can learn to play chess as well as human (also unaided by a C compiler). Certainly humans can't become grandmasters only by reading chess transcripts on the web, and certainly humans require many "thinking tokens" during a game to play effectively. Do you know for sure that a transformer can't reach grandmaster level if it is allowed to learn by playing games (as humans do) and is given a sufficient number of thinking tokens during the game? It seems near certain that they could, if someone wanted to spend the money (and I don't see why anyone would.)

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

#539

Post by lolakutty »

moomoo11 wrote: post #519
StevePrefontain wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. th…

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

So what ever shit the "AI" gets wrong, it is the user's fault, right?

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

#540

Post by xdennis »

jaykru wrote: post #479
yshklarov wrote: post #209

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!

What is the logic behind transforming `FreeBSD RCEs` to `freebsd RCEs`?

If what you're trying to communicate is that, like Sam Altman, you're too cool the press the shift key, then why write some initialisms in upper case? After all, there is a style of acronyms that are always written in lower case: Latin ones ("i.e.", "e.g.")

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