Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CamperBob2 14 days ago
But most of the stuff it returns existed before

No, it did not.

Start with clean llm, no external previous ideas of humans inserted into it, and let it generate some wisdom on its own and then lets talk.

An LLM is about as likely to do that as you are. The ability to generate "wisdom" ab initio cannot possibly be a criterion for intelligent reasoning. The ability to arrive at novel mathematics proofs, on the other hand, is good enough for me.

Intelligence means making the most of the resources and information available, not the ability to speedrun the Big Bang. LLMs are certainly smarter than humans who dismiss them as "text searchers."

1 comments

>No, it did not.

It did. In the form of a pattern that humans are too incapable of recongizing. LLMs identify and repeat the pattern. That is all.

For example, if A -> B and B -> C, logic dictates A -> C. But LLMs will be able to state that A -> C, without actually using logic, if there is sufficient statements in its training data that says A -> B and B -> C and A -> C. So now if you say P -> Q and Q -> R, it will say that P -> R, when there is no explict P -> R in the training data and NOT using logic. For you, it looks like a new discovery inferred using logic when it is not. But that is how that happens..

It is just pattern recognition masquarading as logic, x, y, or z.

And it doesn't bother you in the slightest that "masquerading" is enough to take gold at IMO?

You're not feeling even the faintest stirrings of cognitive dissonance when a "text search" solves math problems you couldn't solve yourself?