[trimethylpurine]

"LLM" as a marketing term seems rational. "Machine learning" also does. We can describe the technology honestly without using a science fiction lexicon. Just because a calculator can do math faster than Isaac Newton doesn't mean it's intelligent. I wouldn't expect it to invent a new way of doing math like Isaac Newton, at least.

[CamperBob2]

Just because a calculator can do math faster than Isaac Newton doesn't mean it's intelligent.

Exactly, and that's the whole point. If you lack genuine mathematical reasoning skill, a calculator won't help you at the IMO. You might as well bring a house plant or a teddy bear.

But if you bring a GPT5-class LLM, you can walk away with a gold medal without having any idea what you're doing.

Consequently, analogies involving calculators are not valid. The burden of proof rests firmly on the shoulders of those who claim that an LLM couldn't invent new mathematical techniques in response to a problem that requires it.

In fact, that appears to have just happened (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664631), where an out-of-distribution proof for an older problem was found. (Meta: also note the vehement arguments in that thread regarding whether or not someone is using an LLM to post comments. That doesn't happen without intelligence, either.)

[trimethylpurine]

That doesn't appear to be what happened. But the marketing sure has a lot of people working quick to presume so.

I would guess it's only a matter of days before that proof, or one very similar, is found in the training data, if that hasn't happened already, just as has been the case every time.

No fundamental change in how the LLM functions has been made that would lead us to expect otherwise.

Similar "discoveries" occurred all the time with the dawn of the internet connecting the dots on a lot of existing knowledge. Many people found that someone had already solved many problems they were working on. We used to be able to search the web, if you can believe that.

The LLMs are bringing that back in a different way. It's functional internet search with an uncanny language model, that sadly obfuscates the underlying data while making guesswork to summarize it (which makes it harder to tell which of its findings are valuable, and which are not).

It's useful for some things, but that's not remotely what intelligence is. It doesn't literally understand.

>* if you bring a GPT5-class LLM, you can walk away with a gold medal without having any idea what you're doing.*

My money won't be betting on your GPT5-class business advice unless you have a really good idea what you're doing.

It requires some (a lot of) intelligence and experience to usefully operate an LLM in virtually every real world scenario. Think about what that implies. (It implies that it's not by itself intelligent.)

[CamperBob2]

You need to read the IMO papers, seriously. Your outlook on what happened there is grossly misinformed. No searching or tool use was involved.

You cannot bluff, trick, or "market" your way through a test like that.

[trimethylpurine]

I didn't say anything about cheating. In fact, if it did cheat, that would make for a much stronger argument in your favor.

If scoring highly on an exam implies intelligence then certainly I'm not intelligent and the Super Nintendo from the 90s is more sentient than myself, given I'm terrible at chess.

I personally don't agree with that definition, nor does any dictionary I'm familiar with, nor do any software engineers with whom I'm familiar, nor any LLM specialists, including the forefront developers at OpenAI, xAI, Google, etc. as far as I'm aware.

But for some reason (it's a very obvious reason $$$), marketers, against the engineers' protest, appear to be claiming otherwise.

This is what you're up against and what you'll find the courts, and lawyers, will go by when this comparison comes to a head.

In my opinion, I can't wait for this to happen.

Thrilled to know if I shouldn't wait for that. If you're directly involved with some credible research to the contrary, I would love to hear more.

But IMO, in this case at least, has nothing to do with intelligence. It's performing a search against its own training data, and piecing together a response in line with that data, while including the context of the search term (aka the question). This is run through a series of linear regressions, and a response is produced. There is nothing really groundbreaking here, as best I can tell.

[CamperBob2]

These arguments usually seem to come down to disagreements about definitions, as you suggest. You've talked about what you don't consider evidence of intelligence, but you haven't said anything about the criteria you would apply. What evidence of intelligent reasoning would change your mind?

It is unsupportable to claim that ML researchers at leading labs share your opinion. Since roughly 2022, they understand that they are working with systems capable of reasoning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916

[trimethylpurine]

Based on an English dictionary definition, I would expect an intelligence exhibits understanding, don't you? I would hope people are reading the dictionary before they market a multibillion dollar product set to reach the masses. It seems irresponsible not to.

The article you linked discussed reasoning. That's really cool. But, consider that we can say that a chess game computer opponent is reasoning. It's using a preprogrammed set of instructions to predict out to some number of possible moves ahead, and choosing the most reasonable. A calculator, essentially, it is in fact reasoning. But that doesn't have much to do with intelligence. As we read in the dictionary, intelligence implies understanding, and we certainly can't say that the Chess Masters opponent from the Super Nintendo literally understands me, right?

More to the point, I don't see that any LLM has thus far exhibited remotely any inkling of understanding, nor can it. It's a linear regression calculator. Much like a lot of TI84 graphing calculators running linear algebraic functions on a grand scale. It's impressive that basic math can achieve results across word archives that sound like a person, but it's still not understanding what it outputs, and really, not what it inputs beyond graphing it algebraically either.

It doesn't literally understand. So, it is not literally intelligent, and it will require some huge breakthroughs to change that. I very much doubt that such a discovery will happen in our lifetime.

It might be more likely that the marketers will succeed in revising the dictionary. We've seen often times that if you use words wrong enough, it becomes right. But so far at least, that hasn't happened with this word.