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

dank.systems

311–320 of 646 posts

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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is no different than Reddit, or any social media for that matter, in that commenters pretend to read articles.

Back in 2001, our social medium was Slashdot and no one ever pretended to read the article. No one read the article either. It was slashdotted most of the time anyways.

Oh shit he said slash dotted. Havent heard that in a long time!

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read all chess tutorials, strategy documentation and game archives on the internet and then would still suck at chess: yes.

Declarative knowledge is not the same as procedural knowledge. You can read as many chess tutorials, strategy documentation and game archives as you like, they won't make you good at chess until you actually start practicing chess.

Does practical improvement apply to only humans or intelligence in general?

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

#313
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to ask. If you want to test SOTA models today, there are obviously only two: GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1. The models listed in the paper are from early 2025 and are no longer relevant, much less on the frontier. That Claude version is no longer available today, Gemini 2.5 Pro will be shutdown next month, and the OpenAI models are only available via the API today.

Fortunately, a fellow commenter was so kind and did it with Astra. Didn't do that well either [0]. I'm sure GPT-7 will be super mega ASI regardless (since GPT-6 Astra already claimed AGI in the minds of Jen-Hsun, et al.)... I'll say it till there is any evidence of the contrary, LLMs are not intelligent and their capabilities solely within the realms of well tailored training data. "Just" having been trained on every…

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

#314
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What levels are they actually at in your experience?

So you can see an actual game on that website, and the play seems pretty decent to me for a while (~1700 lichess = 1300 elo) until move 28 when black throws away their queen for absolutely no reason in an incomprehensible blunder. In some ways this is reflective of the AI experience at large, sometimes shockingly competent but then also sometimes ludicrously incompetent.

I've always liked the analogy that talking to an LLM is like talking to a really, really smart person with a head injury.

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

#315

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…

Llm systems are not really build for adhering to a grammar (other than "a string og tokens"). It is also not clear whether the llm adhering to a grammar is necessary for intelligent agents. Certainly,a harness can easily correct for it.

Someone build a chess harness already...

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suck at chess. Are you saying I can't be intelligent?

is that what I'm saying? or am I talking about AGI? perhaps there's some irony here to be explored when it comes to basic reading comprehension gaps

My point was you are misunderstanding G, or at least applying it erroneously here. Being good at chess is not a generalization of any other body of knowledge, it is a rigorous set of rules. The only way to be good at chess is to practice chess, or to apply deep calculations. The latter is the model writing code.

The illegal move aspect has more to do with a failure of online/in-context learning, which would support your point. I tend to think it is a byproduct of reasoning in language, which newer architectures would fix, but we shall see.

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

#317
post #73

The premise in the very first point seems off: > the frontier labs are priced according to the narrative that they have produced or will in the very near future produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers... Even assuming this is how the AI companies are being valued (they're not), the numbers are off. The "value" of most knowledge workers -- based on what enterprises currently pay for th…

“Bearing” is not how products are priced.

You need to think in terms of supply and demand.

The demand is there, but the supply is also going to skyrocket. Free open weights models will contribute to supply too.

There will be a new equilibrium that’s hard to predict.

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

#318

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.

Counter-point: Doesn't make it hard to read at all, definitely not "egregious" as it's a very common style to find for informal writing all over the internet.

Author's own style is certainly refreshing and welcome over LLM slop that dominates most HN posts now.

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

#319
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gap in capabilities is mostly quantitative and not qualitative.

Is it? I am on the fence on this, but it does seem like there are some qualitative improvements between the models. Not related to your post, but a fact I keep mulling over. The fact I don't trust the current crop of LLM's enough and I consider LLM's as a tech will hit a ceiling pretty hard, it doesn't mean parallel improvement curves won't spring up out of other research that will lead to much higher capabilities th…

> Is it?

Yes, it is.

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

#320
post #294
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. My understanding is that current models will eventually fall into making illegal moves in longer chess games, and that no amount of prompting reliably gets them to stop doing so.

I've not noticed this happening if you give it the FEN each move. The alternative is just blindfold chess and very few humans can do that for long.

I haven't tried it myself, but people seem to report that the illegal moves surface eventually. It just takes longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49720751

Nothing is forcing the LLM to play 'blind'. If it's smart, it should be able to create its own representation of the chess board and update it with every move, just like a human would. Any chess engine that's sensitive to how the moves are formatted is clearly not very capable.

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