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I'm seriously fed up with all this fact-free AI hype. Whenever an LLM regurgitates training data, it's heralded as the coming of AGI. Whenever it's shown that t

I'm seriously fed up with all this fact-free AI hype. Whenever an LLM regurgitates training data, it's heralded as the coming of AGI. Whenever it's shown that they can't solve any novel problem, the research is in bad faith (but please make sure to publish the questions so that the next model version can solve them -- of course completely by chance). Here's a quote from the article: > How many humans can sit down and correctly work out a thousand Tower of Hanoi steps? There are definitely many humans who could do this. But there are also many humans who can’t. Do those humans not have the ability to reason? Of course they do! They just don’t have the conscientiousness and patience required to correctly go through a thousand iterations of the algorithm by hand. (Footnote: I would like to sit down all the people who are smugly tweeting about this with a pen and paper and get them to produce every solution step for ten-disk Tower of Hanoi.) In case someone imagines that fancy recursive reasoning is necessary to solve the Towers of Hanoi, here's the algorithm to move 10 (or any even number of) disks from peg A to peg C: 1. Move one disk from peg A to peg B or vice versa, whichever move is legal. 2. Move one disk from peg A to peg C or vice versa, whichever move is legal. 3. Move one disk from peg B to peg C or vice versa, whichever move is legal. 4. Goto 1. Second-graders can follow that, if motivated enough. There's now constant, nonstop, obnoxious shouting on every channel about how these AI models have solved the Turing test (one wonders just how stupid these "evaluators" were), are at the level of junior devs (LOL), and actually already have "PhD level" reasoning capabilities. I don't know who is supposed to be fooled -- we have access to these things, we can try them. One can easily knock out any latest version of GPT-PhD-level-model-of-the-week with a trivial question. Nothing fundamentally changed about that since GPT-2. The hype and the observable reality are now so far apart that one really has to wonder: Are people this easily gullible? Or do so many people in tech benefit from the hype train that they don't want to rain on the parade?

akoboldfrying 1y ago
> obnoxious shouting on every channel about how these AI models have solved the Turing test (one wonders just how stupid these "evaluators" were) Huh? Schoolteachers and university professors complaining about being unable to distinguish ChatGPT-written essay answers from student-written essay answers is literally ChatGPT passing the Turing test in real time.
- amelius 1y ago
  It's a Turning test with human-prefiltered responses at best.
- delusional 1y ago
  No it's not. The traditional interpretation of the Turing test requires interactivity. That is, the evaluator is allowed to ask questions and will receive a response from both a person and a machine. The idea is that there should be no sequence of questions you can ask that would reliably identify the machine. That's not even close to true for these "AI" systems.
  - akoboldfrying 1y ago
    You're right about interactivity, something that I overlooked -- but I think it's nevertheless the case that a large fraction of human interrogators could not distinguish a human from a suitably-system-prompted ChatGPT even over the course of an interactive discussion. ChatGPT 4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time in this RCT study, where human interrogators had 5-minute conversations with a human and an LLM: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674
    - Joeboy 1y ago
      This is kind of an irrelevant (and doubtless unoriginal) shower thought here but, if humans are judging the AI to be human much more often than the human, surely that means the AI is not faithfully reproducing human behaviour.
      - delusional 1y ago
        This comes down to the interpretation of the Turing test. Turing's original test actually pitted the two "unknowns" against each other. Put simply, both the human and the computer would try to make you believe they were the person. The objective of the game was to be seen as human, not to be indistinguishable from human. This is obviously not quite what people understand the Turing test as anymore, and I think that interpretation confusion actually ends up weakening the linked paper. Your thought aptly describes a problem with the paper, but that problem is not present in the Turing test by its original formulation.
vidarh 1y ago
> Second-graders can follow that, if motivated enough. Try to motivate them sufficiently to do so without error for a large number of disks, I dare you. Now repeat this experiment while randomly refusing to accept the answer they're most confident in for any given iteration, and pick an answer they're less confident in on their behalf, and insist they still solve it without error. (To make it equivalent to the researchers running this with temperature set to 1)
mannykannot 1y ago
Yes, the whole "Towers of Hanoi is a bad test case" objection is a non-sequitur here. It would be a significant objection if the machines performed well, but not given the actual outcome - it is as if an alleged chess grandmaster almost always lost against opponents of unexceptional ability. It is actually worse than that analogy: Towers of Hanoi is a bimodal puzzle, in which players who grasp the general solution do inordinately better than those who do not, and the machines here are performing like the latter. Lest anyone thinks otherwise, this is not a case of setting up the machines to fail, any more than the chess analogy would be. The choice of Towers of Hanoi leaves it conceivable that they do would well on tough problems, but that is not very plausible and needs to be demonstrated before it can be assumed.
- vidarh 1y ago
  They set it up to fail the moment they ran it with a large number of disks and assumed the models would just continue as if it ran the same simple algorithm in a loop, and the moment they set temperature to 1.
  - mannykannot 1y ago
    I take your point that the absence of any discussion of the effect of temperature choice or justification for choosing 1 seems to be an issue with the paper (unless it is quite obviously the only rational choice to those working in the field?)
munksbeer 1y ago
I could be wrong, but it seems you have misunderstood something here, and you've even quoted the part that you've misunderstood. It isn't that the algorithm for solving the problem isn't known. The LLM knows it, just like you do. It is that the steps of following the algorithm are too verbose if you're just writing them down and trying to keep track of the state of the problem in your head. Could you do that for a large number of disks? Please do correct me if the misunderstanding is mine.
- emp17344 1y ago
  I feel like practically anybody could solve Tower of Hanoi for any degree of complexity using this algorithm. It’s a four step process that you just repeat over and over.
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    That's an algorithm to solve it, but you have to describe every move at every step, while doing this on paper or in your head, while keeping track of the state of the game, again, in your head. That is what they're challenging the LLM to do. I challenge you to do that for any complexity.
    - emp17344 1y ago
      It’s four steps. It’s not rocket science.
      - munksbeer 1y ago
        You're still misunderstanding. If it is easy, please feel free to demonstrate solving it by telling us what the 1300th step is from working it out in your head.

akoboldfrying 1y ago

> obnoxious shouting on every channel about how these AI models have solved the Turing test (one wonders just how stupid these "evaluators" were) Huh? Schoolteachers and university professors complaining about being unable to distinguish ChatGPT-written essay answers from student-written essay answers is literally ChatGPT passing the Turing test in real time.

amelius 1y ago
It's a Turning test with human-prefiltered responses at best.
delusional 1y ago
No it's not. The traditional interpretation of the Turing test requires interactivity. That is, the evaluator is allowed to ask questions and will receive a response from both a person and a machine. The idea is that there should be no sequence of questions you can ask that would reliably identify the machine. That's not even close to true for these "AI" systems.
- akoboldfrying 1y ago
  You're right about interactivity, something that I overlooked -- but I think it's nevertheless the case that a large fraction of human interrogators could not distinguish a human from a suitably-system-prompted ChatGPT even over the course of an interactive discussion. ChatGPT 4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time in this RCT study, where human interrogators had 5-minute conversations with a human and an LLM: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674
  - Joeboy 1y ago
    This is kind of an irrelevant (and doubtless unoriginal) shower thought here but, if humans are judging the AI to be human much more often than the human, surely that means the AI is not faithfully reproducing human behaviour.
    - delusional 1y ago
      This comes down to the interpretation of the Turing test. Turing's original test actually pitted the two "unknowns" against each other. Put simply, both the human and the computer would try to make you believe they were the person. The objective of the game was to be seen as human, not to be indistinguishable from human. This is obviously not quite what people understand the Turing test as anymore, and I think that interpretation confusion actually ends up weakening the linked paper. Your thought aptly describes a problem with the paper, but that problem is not present in the Turing test by its original formulation.

vidarh 1y ago

> Second-graders can follow that, if motivated enough. Try to motivate them sufficiently to do so without error for a large number of disks, I dare you. Now repeat this experiment while randomly refusing to accept the answer they're most confident in for any given iteration, and pick an answer they're less confident in on their behalf, and insist they still solve it without error. (To make it equivalent to the researchers running this with temperature set to 1)

mannykannot 1y ago

Yes, the whole "Towers of Hanoi is a bad test case" objection is a non-sequitur here. It would be a significant objection if the machines performed well, but not given the actual outcome - it is as if an alleged chess grandmaster almost always lost against opponents of unexceptional ability. It is actually worse than that analogy: Towers of Hanoi is a bimodal puzzle, in which players who grasp the general solution do inordinately better than those who do not, and the machines here are performing like the latter. Lest anyone thinks otherwise, this is not a case of setting up the machines to fail, any more than the chess analogy would be. The choice of Towers of Hanoi leaves it conceivable that they do would well on tough problems, but that is not very plausible and needs to be demonstrated before it can be assumed.

vidarh 1y ago
They set it up to fail the moment they ran it with a large number of disks and assumed the models would just continue as if it ran the same simple algorithm in a loop, and the moment they set temperature to 1.
- mannykannot 1y ago
  I take your point that the absence of any discussion of the effect of temperature choice or justification for choosing 1 seems to be an issue with the paper (unless it is quite obviously the only rational choice to those working in the field?)

munksbeer 1y ago

I could be wrong, but it seems you have misunderstood something here, and you've even quoted the part that you've misunderstood. It isn't that the algorithm for solving the problem isn't known. The LLM knows it, just like you do. It is that the steps of following the algorithm are too verbose if you're just writing them down and trying to keep track of the state of the problem in your head. Could you do that for a large number of disks? Please do correct me if the misunderstanding is mine.

emp17344 1y ago
I feel like practically anybody could solve Tower of Hanoi for any degree of complexity using this algorithm. It’s a four step process that you just repeat over and over.
- munksbeer 1y ago
  That's an algorithm to solve it, but you have to describe every move at every step, while doing this on paper or in your head, while keeping track of the state of the game, again, in your head. That is what they're challenging the LLM to do. I challenge you to do that for any complexity.
  - emp17344 1y ago
    It’s four steps. It’s not rocket science.
    - munksbeer 1y ago
      You're still misunderstanding. If it is easy, please feel free to demonstrate solving it by telling us what the 1300th step is from working it out in your head.