Baldur BjarnasonMay 21, 2025
"LLMs are here to stay," is like saying that the modem-based internet of the 90s was forever. It was a largely unusable piece-of-shit tech that was manifestly incapable of delivering beyond a fraction of what the dot-com bubble promised, but it prompted investment in fixing the one thing that prevented that promise: bandwidth.
Show threadBarry Schwartz đź«–May 21, 2025

@baldur Yesterday I proved once again that "AI" isn't even an attempt at actual intelligence, by asking one in Swedish whether it spoke Swedish. It didn't even recognize I was using a different language.

But the real proof is that human intelligence is obviously not language-based. Otherwise other highly intelligent mammals—especially great apes—would all have recursively structured language!

LLMs will NEVER be able to do actual mathematics. They can pass high school "math" tests. Big deal.

Show threadJoe AlexanderMay 21, 2025
@chemoelectric Apes have human intelligence?
Show threadBarry Schwartz đź«–May 22, 2025

@joe The intelligence of a chimpanzee and the intelligence of a human must be almost the same thing, IN TERMS OF MECHANISM. And the brains are structured almost the same, as well.

If the requirement of similarity is not obvious to you then you might be either a Creationist or an LLM advocate. :)

Here is a problem that cannot be solved by juggling language like an LLM, and which even most mathematically educated humans solve incorrectly: With what probability is six the last digit of pi?

Show threadBarry Schwartz đź«–May 22, 2025
@joe What a chimpanzee and a human have in common is they can reason in pictures, by directions in relation to their bodies, etc. These are the types of reasoning needed to solve that problem.
Show threadJoe Alexander
@chemoelectric Please preach more about chimp problem solving and exactly how it works.
May 22, 2025 at 2:08pmWeb