61–70 of 309 posts
Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet. Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction…
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It's more that "thinking" is a vague term that we don't even understand in humans, so for me it's pretty meaningless to claim LLMs think or don't think. There's this very cliched comment to any AI HN headline which is this: "LLM's don't REALLY have . I know this for sure because I know both how humans work and how gigabytes of LLM weights work." or its cousin: "LLMs CAN'T possibly do BECAUSE they generate text one ch…
To me, it's about motivation. Intelligent living beings have natural, evolutionary inputs as motivation underlying every rational thought. A biological reward system in the brain, a desire to avoid pain, hunger, boredom and sadness, seek to satisfy physiological needs, socialize, self-actualize, etc. These are the fundamental forces that drive us, even if the rational processes are capable of suppressing or delaying…
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I recently saw an article about LLMs and Towers of Hanoi. An LLM can write code to solve it. It can also output steps to solve it when the disk count is low like 3. It can’t give the steps when the disk count is higher. This indicates LLMs inability to reason and understand. Also see Gotham Chess and the Chatbot Championship. The Chatbots start off making good moves, but then quickly transition to making illegal move…
Could the LLM "write code to solve it" if no human ever wrote code to solve it? Could it output "steps to solve it" if no human ever wrote about it before to have in its training data? The answer is no.
That doesn't mean much.
Well, for starters, it would make The Economist 's recent article on "What if AI made the world's economic growth explode?" [1] look like the product of overly credulous suckers for AI hype. [1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/07/24/what-if-ai-mad...
I’m curious about exploring the topics “What if the war in Ukraine ends in the next 12 months” just as much as “What if the war in Ukraine keeps going for the next 10 years”, doesn’t mean I expect both to happen.
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[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.
When I write a sentence, I do it with intent, with specific purpose in mind . When an "AI" does it, it's predicting the next word that might satisfy the input requirement. It doesn't care if the sentence it writes makes any sense, is factual, etc, so long as it is human readable and follows gramatic rules. It does not do this with any specific intent, which is why you get slop and just plain wrong output a fair amoun…
When you type the next word you also put a word that fits some requirement. That doesn't mean you're not thinking.
How about a link that works? Neither the OP's URL nor djoldman's archive link allow access to the article!8-((
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Could the LLM "write code to solve it" if no human ever wrote code to solve it? Could it output "steps to solve it" if no human ever wrote about it before to have in its training data? The answer is no.
Could a human code the solution if they didn't learn to code from someone else? No. Could they do it if someone didn't tell them the rules of towers of hanoi? No. That doesn't mean much.
Well, for starters, it would make The Economist 's recent article on "What if AI made the world's economic growth explode?" [1] look like the product of overly credulous suckers for AI hype. [1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/07/24/what-if-ai-mad...
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Could the LLM "write code to solve it" if no human ever wrote code to solve it? Could it output "steps to solve it" if no human ever wrote about it before to have in its training data? The answer is no.
Could a human code the solution if they didn't learn to code from someone else? No. Could they do it if someone didn't tell them the rules of towers of hanoi? No. That doesn't mean much.