Fully agree, although it’s interesting to consider the perspective that the entire LLM hype cycle is largely built around the question “what if we punted on act

Fully agree, although it’s interesting to consider the perspective that the entire LLM hype cycle is largely built around the question “what if we punted on actual thinking and instead just tried to memorize everything and then provide a human language query frontend? Is that still useful?” Arguably it is (sorta), and that’s what is driving this latest zeitgeist. Compute had quietly scaled in the background while we were banging our heads against real thinking, until one day we looked up and we still didn’t have a thinking machine, but it was now approximately possible to just do the stupid thing and store “all the text on the internet” in a lookup table, where the keys are prompts. That’s… the opposite of thinking, really, but still sometimes useful! Although to be clear I think actual reasoning systems are what we should be trying to create, and this LLM stuff seems like a cul-de-sac on that journey.