[PaulDavisThe1st]

If I knew the r-value, I wouldn't need to ask an LLM.

The sort of logic systems that were the focus of a lot of AI work before "deep learning" came along would certainly have "taken the r-value of adobe" into account (had they been exposed to such knowledge). That's because they explicitly reason about things in the world that they are trained to reason about.

Gary Marcus has been quite usefully vocal about this. We used to try to build AI systems (some still are) based on the idea that you need a world model, and you need logic and inference and relationships.

LLMs have convinced, it seems, rather a lot of people that we can just discard all that - "the system will learn the patterns all by itself".

Marcus doesn't agree, and neither do I (not that my opinion is worth much).