4 ms·

My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8

32 points by iamanatom 26d ago

lolakutty 26d ago
Are people paid to write this shite?
- as112-asd 26d ago
  Yes: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creators-500000-and-more-to-promote-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...
- thirtygeo 26d ago
  AI;dr
- scotty79 26d ago
  Yeah, people are paid to promote AI and people are paid to criticize AI. Regardless of the issue money flows to pundits on both sides. Then the manufactured engagement is milked for ad profit.
znnajdla 26d ago
I think the author is not aware of how much the Millennium Prize proof was actually driven by a human working for years towards that problem. The AI did not solve this on its own. A world class mathematician prompted it towards the proof. In my view, this is still a human achievement, not an AI achievement. If I design a bulldozer to push a five ton rock, did I push the rock or the bulldozer? If the AI really did get the Millennium Prize, then why can't you get a Millennium Prize when you have access to the exact same model in ChatGPT?
- matteoraso 26d ago
  This is copium. Humans worked on it, but they didn't come close to actually solving it. Even if you do the whole "the AI looked at material in its training data" thing, modern AI can make their own math data to train on with RLVF. This new model is legitimately on a different plane of existence from modern mathematicians.
  - unrented7977 26d ago
    Using the word "copium" is a "if you smelt it you dealt it" type of deal.
  - imjonse 26d ago
    it should be able to solve some of the five left Millenium Prize problems then in a few weeks.
    - scotty79 26d ago
      Why in weeks, not months or years?
    - weatherlite 26d ago
      Probably will solve a couple more at least in the coming year , no ? Why wouldn't it ?
  - znnajdla 26d ago
    My point is, the AI could not have done what it did without the skilled mathemetician prompting it. It was just a tool in the hands of the human that did it. And that was a very skilled human. Unless you're a professional mathematician, you cannot get the same result even if you use the same AI model. That's the proof that it's the human's work, not the AI. Why don't you try getting a Millennium Prize then? If you think it was the AI that did it, you have access to the exact same ChatGPT.
    - matteoraso 26d ago
      I don't have access to the exact agent OpenAI used, and I certainly don't have access to the enormous amount of tokens that were used. That being said, I doubt there was some advanced prompting technique going on here. We've seen AI proofs with the prompts attached, and it's pretty basic stuff like "don't give up".
      - znnajdla 26d ago
        I think you're not aware of the specifics of this case. A mathematician worked on the prompts for over a year to get this proof. Look up the details.
- atleastoptimal 26d ago
  You could say that about every scientific/mathematical breakthrough. Einstein's Special relativity depended heavily on Lorentz's work, the Michelson-Morley experiments, Maxwell's equations. Grigori Perelman, the only person to have solved a Millenium Prize problem, noted how his work was only possible due to Richard S. Hamilton's work on Ricci flow. Most scientific breakthroughs are just the completing the last 5% of work already done, but that last 5% is very hard and still only happens very rarely. That an AI was able to synthesize all the work and bring it forward is evidence that AI can make novel progress on the same level as renown mathematicians.
  - deleted 26d ago
    [deleted]
  - LogicFailsMe 26d ago
    Einstein literally stated he was not influenced by the Michelson-Morley experiments, but it's a common myth that he was. "When Ι asked him how he had learned of the Michelson Morley experiment, he told me that he had become aware of it through writings of Η. Α. Lοrentz, but only after 1905 had it come to his attention! "Otherwise" he said, "I would have mentioned it in my paper!" indeed, Einstein's 1905 paper contains no mention of Μichelson's experiment or references to Lorentz's papers." From https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89375/did-einstein-know-about-the-michelson-morley-experiment https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89375/did-einste... Correcting a professor at MIT (head of the department alas) on this erroneous belief during a grad school interview cost me admission as he insisted otherwise and wouldn't back down. Ironically, one of my college professors was interviewed on NPR a week later and confirmed what I had stated. Ask me what I think of checked out, tenured academics. Go ahead...
    - atleastoptimal 26d ago
      That may be true, but Lorentz specifically cited the MM experiments and was influenced by them, and Einstein cited and was influenced by Lorentz, so he was influenced, just one level removed. >https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-663-19510-8_1 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-663-19510-8_...
- butlike 26d ago
  > If I design a bulldozer to push a five ton rock, did I push the rock or the bulldozer? Unequivocally the bulldozer. You get to take the blame in design of the bulldozer, though.
  - etatoby 26d ago
    The law (which is supposed to codify the common sense and shared values underpinning a society—note "supposed to") disagrees with you: if I use a bulldozer to damage your property, you can sue me, not the bulldozer or its maker.
    - dwaltrip 26d ago
      Sure, legally. But practically speaking, who did the heavy lifting? The operator or the machine?
      - lolakutty 26d ago
        Everyone who's ideas made bulldozer possible, I would say..
- borzi 26d ago
  No, no, you don't get it - soon Joe Sixpack will be prompting AGI "solve me {super difficult problem researchers couldn't solved for centuries}" and releasing their own research papers!
nickphx 26d ago
why should i care about your mental model of anything?
pingou 26d ago
It took the author until Sept. 8, 2026, to realize LLMs are not just stochastic parrots? I'm glad they did, but I'm not sure that is worthy of the front page. "I remember early systems struggling with something as simple as 2+2. Then, within just a few years, we went from that to systems achieving IMO gold-medal-level performance and now, assuming this proof is correct, to a Millennium Prize problem. That completely changes how I think about the trajectory". How would Sept. 8 completely change how they think about the trajectory? Seems like there has been tremendous progress at all time.
- mikeyouse 26d ago
  It isn't hard to conceive of things that plateau so perhaps OP thought that the 'intelligence' underlying these models would reach some mark and then level off. If instead they just keep getting smarter/better, that can really impact the highest potential use that people can imagine for them.
- frizlab 26d ago
  They still are parrots. Just properly trained with a lot of data. Doesn’t make them not useful. But that’s what they are though.
  - pingou 26d ago
    I interpret the word 'parrot' to mean incapable of creative or original thought. Solving a major maths problem that has resisted the best mathematicians for so long seems to prove otherwise (even if it were just a matter of remixing old ideas, which is not the case here). What do they need to do for you to consider them non parrots, and do you consider a lot of humans as parrots?
    - lolakutty 26d ago
      >creative or original thought. If this can only answer questions, then it fails this test. Because at least the question has to come from somewhere...
    - 26d ago
mden 26d ago
It's hard to say exactly how much credit Astra gets if its training contained the research notes of Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster. Surely it's impressive to generate the result even if working from their notes but it muddies the waters on its capabilities quite a bit. From https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/: > we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models
EastLondonCoder 26d ago
For me it was a few years ago. I had seen a twitter comment referencing astrology in a spat with two black female musicians in the US. My preconception was to look up why that kind of superstition was prevalent in those circles. The answer I got from chapgpt was essentially that it has very little to do with superstition and all to do with being able to use a language to talk about stuff while still not move outside cultural norms. More sort of a secret language where you can probe questions like if your boyfriend is violent, or if your friend is having an affair. I think last year I saw some research on how the reading of tea leaves originated in the ottoman empire, it was remarkably similar. The point is that I learned something new that would have been extraordinarily hard to google, or even understand without putting some serious study into the subject.
- anonymous_user9 26d ago
  > even understand without putting some serious study into the subject. Then how can you possibly know that it's true?
  - EastLondonCoder 26d ago
    I can’t, and it’s not really the point. The point is that I got exposed to a new way of looking at a phenomenon that I haven’t thought about before.
scotty79 26d ago
> My belief system was shattered the day the proof was announced. I can't imagine having eyes and being able to hold the wrong belief regarding AI for so long. The fact that AI can surpass humans and make novel contributions to our civilization was obvious for me at least about a year earlier. You need to have pretty messianic view of humans to believe otherwise.
- XenophileJKO 26d ago
  To me, as soon as it was obvious that training had distilled and connected abstract concepts of increasing generality, it was only a matter of time. Almost any "new" idea can be decomposed into a combination of old component concepts. It was evident in GPT-3.5
hopelessluca 26d ago
I guess this post is not worthy of the front page. It is poorly written, repetitive, and feels like it was written by a LLM. It seems more like a reactionary post about events that have already happened. There is no insightful signal whatsoever just a remix of existing rhetoric. Ironically, the blog is also called "Rough Ideas" and the homepage says that the blog may contain rough ideas. I guess Hacker News has declined in quality these days. I might get flagged for saying this.
nelaggy 26d ago
seems to me that many advancements so far are more the product of intelligent effort than pure brilliance, i'm still hopeful that human researchers (and humans in general) will remain better at asking the right questions and making good decisions
derac 26d ago
The cognitive bias in humans to believe higher intelligence is unique to humans and even supernatural is very, very strong.
- sph 26d ago
  Do you have like concrete proof this is not the case? We do not. We haven’t yet met higher intelligences. You have no basis to call it a bias.
GMoromisato 26d ago
The problem isn't the mental model of AI--it's the mental model of intelligence. If you think intelligence is some non-algorithmic, non-computable process then of course you won't believe that an AI can be intelligent. But since Turing's time we've known that intelligence is just computation--it's not until recently that we've been able to come up with the specific algorithm. Think back to Kasparov playing Deep Blue. Back then, some people (including Kasparov) believed that a computer would never beat a human. They felt that human creativity and ability to see the whole board would always beat brute-force computation. I watched the pivotal game 5 live. There was a point where Deep Blue made a pawn move away from the main action. The commentators at the time, chess master all, almost cheered--it looked like the machine had blundered. "It's playing like a computer" they said. But one look at Kasparov told you they were wrong. Kasparov was worried. The main action resolved, but in the end, that one pawn move, 20 moves prior, left Deep Blue in a better position. What modern LLMs do is apply brute-force computation to any domain expressible in language--not just a restricted chess domain. That's the algorithm.
- comandillos 26d ago
  > What modern LLMs do is apply brute-force computation to any domain expressible in language--not just a restricted chess domain. That's the algorithm. Which means that companies with sufficient computational resources and money will be capable of unlocking problems thousands of times faster and more effective than any individual even when lacking the skills, just by a matter of try and error.
tescreal 26d ago
This, despite the ongoing social litigation of if this is even real? I believe AI is quite capable in the right circumstances, but I'm not convinced "this" is the watershed moment.
- scotty79 26d ago
  I think the watershed moment was when it was proven that it can solve highschoolers maths olympiad problems at competitive level. These problems require complexity of thinking that is beyond what most humans have to deal with in their entire lifetime. When AI took that in stride it was obvious that sky is the limit and entirety of current human achivement is a milestone but in a sense of the one that the car passes while doing 60.
  - lolakutty 26d ago
    >entirety of current human achivement.. The right way to look at it is that LLMs help us to maximize the utility of the entirety of current human achievement/knowledge by discovering obscure connections in it.
    - scotty79 26d ago
      So pretty much the same thing that humans do. New things come out of those connections.
      - lolakutty 26d ago
        Yea, it is a better search tool than humans, as computers always were....
        scotty79 26d ago
        The qualitative difference is that it searches semantically across unstructured data and is able to cleverly combine related searches into an answer. Imagine SQL but the queries mostly write themselves and database is just entirety of human knowledge with no formalization. If you were to create such thing 7 years ago you'd say somebody expects a miracle out of you. I don't get why so many people have trouble recognizing it now as such.
keybored 26d ago
Another convert who can parrot what the detractors said/are saying and that ends with a thoughts-and-prayers socially progressive umm hope this doesn’t exarcerbate hooman differences too much. See you don’t need an LLM to summarize.
erelong 26d ago
> I had held a very different view of AI: that it was basically a stochastic parrot imo it's been not like that for a few years now (alternatively, stochastic parrots' abilities have been underestimated)
Garlef 26d ago
I don't know. What's the tl;dr here? "I'm one of the last few who needed convincing, now listen to my thoughts on what's next!"
WarmWash 26d ago
I'm continually perplexed by people's perception that AI would be incapable of generating new ideas or discoveries, even years ago. Deterministic machines do the same stuff again and again. Add entropy and they do new original stuff. Add a checker or verifier and you can filter for new stuff that is better. At the very least here, you now have evolution. There is nothing that is particularly compelling about a system that can generate new stuff that is an improvement. What's compelling if anything is the verifier, but that isn't particularly any more mysterious than LLM output already. At least not nearly as mysterious as "Meat brains have a magical ability to manifest original ideas".
- lolakutty 26d ago
  >Meat brains have a magical ability to manifest original ideas.. No, no. Any random sentence generator can generate original idea. Actually it is said that randomness contain all the answers. You don't need a "meat brain" to do that.
- no-name-here 26d ago
  > I'm continually perplexed by people's perception that AI would be incapable of generating new ideas or discoveries, even years ago. It's still an incredibly common claim, at least on places like Reddit. Perhaps Doctrow has been pushing the idea or something? And Zitron claimed that years ago AI was already as good as it was ever going to be - like Zitron, I imagine a lot of people haven't changed their opinions in recent years even as AI advanced.
kittikitti 26d ago
The number of people I've heard calling AI a "stochastic parrot" is concerning. You don't understand what is or isn't stochastic and you're parroting this phrase. You yourself are a stochastic parrot.
- cindyllm 26d ago
  [dead]
aquafox 26d ago
> but that an AI system may have produced new mathematical knowledge that humanity did not have before From the expose in Terence Taos blog [1], it seems the difficulty of the Navier-Stokes counter example is a delicate balancing act between having a blow-up solution and a well behaved force field. And this involves a lot of technical arguments based on already existing ideas. If this is true, then the achievement of the AI is rather to correctly navigating this balancing than inventing something completely new. [1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup-with-smooth-forcing-term-for-the-incompressible-porous-medium-boussinesq-and-incompressible-euler-equations/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup...

32 points by iamanatom 26d ago

lolakutty 26d ago

Are people paid to write this shite?

as112-asd 26d ago
Yes: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creators-500000-and-more-to-promote-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...
thirtygeo 26d ago
AI;dr
scotty79 26d ago
Yeah, people are paid to promote AI and people are paid to criticize AI. Regardless of the issue money flows to pundits on both sides. Then the manufactured engagement is milked for ad profit.

znnajdla 26d ago

I think the author is not aware of how much the Millennium Prize proof was actually driven by a human working for years towards that problem. The AI did not solve this on its own. A world class mathematician prompted it towards the proof. In my view, this is still a human achievement, not an AI achievement. If I design a bulldozer to push a five ton rock, did I push the rock or the bulldozer? If the AI really did get the Millennium Prize, then why can't you get a Millennium Prize when you have access to the exact same model in ChatGPT?

matteoraso 26d ago
This is copium. Humans worked on it, but they didn't come close to actually solving it. Even if you do the whole "the AI looked at material in its training data" thing, modern AI can make their own math data to train on with RLVF. This new model is legitimately on a different plane of existence from modern mathematicians.
- unrented7977 26d ago
  Using the word "copium" is a "if you smelt it you dealt it" type of deal.
- imjonse 26d ago
  it should be able to solve some of the five left Millenium Prize problems then in a few weeks.
  - scotty79 26d ago
    Why in weeks, not months or years?
  - weatherlite 26d ago
    Probably will solve a couple more at least in the coming year , no ? Why wouldn't it ?
- znnajdla 26d ago
  My point is, the AI could not have done what it did without the skilled mathemetician prompting it. It was just a tool in the hands of the human that did it. And that was a very skilled human. Unless you're a professional mathematician, you cannot get the same result even if you use the same AI model. That's the proof that it's the human's work, not the AI. Why don't you try getting a Millennium Prize then? If you think it was the AI that did it, you have access to the exact same ChatGPT.
  - matteoraso 26d ago
    I don't have access to the exact agent OpenAI used, and I certainly don't have access to the enormous amount of tokens that were used. That being said, I doubt there was some advanced prompting technique going on here. We've seen AI proofs with the prompts attached, and it's pretty basic stuff like "don't give up".
    - znnajdla 26d ago
      I think you're not aware of the specifics of this case. A mathematician worked on the prompts for over a year to get this proof. Look up the details.
atleastoptimal 26d ago
You could say that about every scientific/mathematical breakthrough. Einstein's Special relativity depended heavily on Lorentz's work, the Michelson-Morley experiments, Maxwell's equations. Grigori Perelman, the only person to have solved a Millenium Prize problem, noted how his work was only possible due to Richard S. Hamilton's work on Ricci flow. Most scientific breakthroughs are just the completing the last 5% of work already done, but that last 5% is very hard and still only happens very rarely. That an AI was able to synthesize all the work and bring it forward is evidence that AI can make novel progress on the same level as renown mathematicians.
- deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
- LogicFailsMe 26d ago
  Einstein literally stated he was not influenced by the Michelson-Morley experiments, but it's a common myth that he was. "When Ι asked him how he had learned of the Michelson Morley experiment, he told me that he had become aware of it through writings of Η. Α. Lοrentz, but only after 1905 had it come to his attention! "Otherwise" he said, "I would have mentioned it in my paper!" indeed, Einstein's 1905 paper contains no mention of Μichelson's experiment or references to Lorentz's papers." From https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89375/did-einstein-know-about-the-michelson-morley-experiment https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89375/did-einste... Correcting a professor at MIT (head of the department alas) on this erroneous belief during a grad school interview cost me admission as he insisted otherwise and wouldn't back down. Ironically, one of my college professors was interviewed on NPR a week later and confirmed what I had stated. Ask me what I think of checked out, tenured academics. Go ahead...
  - atleastoptimal 26d ago
    That may be true, but Lorentz specifically cited the MM experiments and was influenced by them, and Einstein cited and was influenced by Lorentz, so he was influenced, just one level removed. >https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-663-19510-8_1 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-663-19510-8_...
butlike 26d ago
> If I design a bulldozer to push a five ton rock, did I push the rock or the bulldozer? Unequivocally the bulldozer. You get to take the blame in design of the bulldozer, though.
- etatoby 26d ago
  The law (which is supposed to codify the common sense and shared values underpinning a society—note "supposed to") disagrees with you: if I use a bulldozer to damage your property, you can sue me, not the bulldozer or its maker.
  - dwaltrip 26d ago
    Sure, legally. But practically speaking, who did the heavy lifting? The operator or the machine?
    - lolakutty 26d ago
      Everyone who's ideas made bulldozer possible, I would say..
borzi 26d ago
No, no, you don't get it - soon Joe Sixpack will be prompting AGI "solve me {super difficult problem researchers couldn't solved for centuries}" and releasing their own research papers!

nickphx 26d ago

why should i care about your mental model of anything?

pingou 26d ago

It took the author until Sept. 8, 2026, to realize LLMs are not just stochastic parrots? I'm glad they did, but I'm not sure that is worthy of the front page. "I remember early systems struggling with something as simple as 2+2. Then, within just a few years, we went from that to systems achieving IMO gold-medal-level performance and now, assuming this proof is correct, to a Millennium Prize problem. That completely changes how I think about the trajectory". How would Sept. 8 completely change how they think about the trajectory? Seems like there has been tremendous progress at all time.

mikeyouse 26d ago
It isn't hard to conceive of things that plateau so perhaps OP thought that the 'intelligence' underlying these models would reach some mark and then level off. If instead they just keep getting smarter/better, that can really impact the highest potential use that people can imagine for them.
frizlab 26d ago
They still are parrots. Just properly trained with a lot of data. Doesn’t make them not useful. But that’s what they are though.
- pingou 26d ago
  I interpret the word 'parrot' to mean incapable of creative or original thought. Solving a major maths problem that has resisted the best mathematicians for so long seems to prove otherwise (even if it were just a matter of remixing old ideas, which is not the case here). What do they need to do for you to consider them non parrots, and do you consider a lot of humans as parrots?
  - lolakutty 26d ago
    >creative or original thought. If this can only answer questions, then it fails this test. Because at least the question has to come from somewhere...
  - 26d ago

mden 26d ago

It's hard to say exactly how much credit Astra gets if its training contained the research notes of Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster. Surely it's impressive to generate the result even if working from their notes but it muddies the waters on its capabilities quite a bit. From https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/: > we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models

EastLondonCoder 26d ago

For me it was a few years ago. I had seen a twitter comment referencing astrology in a spat with two black female musicians in the US. My preconception was to look up why that kind of superstition was prevalent in those circles. The answer I got from chapgpt was essentially that it has very little to do with superstition and all to do with being able to use a language to talk about stuff while still not move outside cultural norms. More sort of a secret language where you can probe questions like if your boyfriend is violent, or if your friend is having an affair. I think last year I saw some research on how the reading of tea leaves originated in the ottoman empire, it was remarkably similar. The point is that I learned something new that would have been extraordinarily hard to google, or even understand without putting some serious study into the subject.

anonymous_user9 26d ago
> even understand without putting some serious study into the subject. Then how can you possibly know that it's true?
- EastLondonCoder 26d ago
  I can’t, and it’s not really the point. The point is that I got exposed to a new way of looking at a phenomenon that I haven’t thought about before.

scotty79 26d ago

> My belief system was shattered the day the proof was announced. I can't imagine having eyes and being able to hold the wrong belief regarding AI for so long. The fact that AI can surpass humans and make novel contributions to our civilization was obvious for me at least about a year earlier. You need to have pretty messianic view of humans to believe otherwise.

XenophileJKO 26d ago
To me, as soon as it was obvious that training had distilled and connected abstract concepts of increasing generality, it was only a matter of time. Almost any "new" idea can be decomposed into a combination of old component concepts. It was evident in GPT-3.5

hopelessluca 26d ago

I guess this post is not worthy of the front page. It is poorly written, repetitive, and feels like it was written by a LLM. It seems more like a reactionary post about events that have already happened. There is no insightful signal whatsoever just a remix of existing rhetoric. Ironically, the blog is also called "Rough Ideas" and the homepage says that the blog may contain rough ideas. I guess Hacker News has declined in quality these days. I might get flagged for saying this.

nelaggy 26d ago

seems to me that many advancements so far are more the product of intelligent effort than pure brilliance, i'm still hopeful that human researchers (and humans in general) will remain better at asking the right questions and making good decisions

derac 26d ago

The cognitive bias in humans to believe higher intelligence is unique to humans and even supernatural is very, very strong.

sph 26d ago
Do you have like concrete proof this is not the case? We do not. We haven’t yet met higher intelligences. You have no basis to call it a bias.

GMoromisato 26d ago

The problem isn't the mental model of AI--it's the mental model of intelligence. If you think intelligence is some non-algorithmic, non-computable process then of course you won't believe that an AI can be intelligent. But since Turing's time we've known that intelligence is just computation--it's not until recently that we've been able to come up with the specific algorithm. Think back to Kasparov playing Deep Blue. Back then, some people (including Kasparov) believed that a computer would never beat a human. They felt that human creativity and ability to see the whole board would always beat brute-force computation. I watched the pivotal game 5 live. There was a point where Deep Blue made a pawn move away from the main action. The commentators at the time, chess master all, almost cheered--it looked like the machine had blundered. "It's playing like a computer" they said. But one look at Kasparov told you they were wrong. Kasparov was worried. The main action resolved, but in the end, that one pawn move, 20 moves prior, left Deep Blue in a better position. What modern LLMs do is apply brute-force computation to any domain expressible in language--not just a restricted chess domain. That's the algorithm.

comandillos 26d ago
> What modern LLMs do is apply brute-force computation to any domain expressible in language--not just a restricted chess domain. That's the algorithm. Which means that companies with sufficient computational resources and money will be capable of unlocking problems thousands of times faster and more effective than any individual even when lacking the skills, just by a matter of try and error.

tescreal 26d ago

This, despite the ongoing social litigation of if this is even real? I believe AI is quite capable in the right circumstances, but I'm not convinced "this" is the watershed moment.

scotty79 26d ago
I think the watershed moment was when it was proven that it can solve highschoolers maths olympiad problems at competitive level. These problems require complexity of thinking that is beyond what most humans have to deal with in their entire lifetime. When AI took that in stride it was obvious that sky is the limit and entirety of current human achivement is a milestone but in a sense of the one that the car passes while doing 60.
- lolakutty 26d ago
  >entirety of current human achivement.. The right way to look at it is that LLMs help us to maximize the utility of the entirety of current human achievement/knowledge by discovering obscure connections in it.
  - scotty79 26d ago
    So pretty much the same thing that humans do. New things come out of those connections.
    - lolakutty 26d ago
      Yea, it is a better search tool than humans, as computers always were....
      - scotty79 26d ago
        The qualitative difference is that it searches semantically across unstructured data and is able to cleverly combine related searches into an answer. Imagine SQL but the queries mostly write themselves and database is just entirety of human knowledge with no formalization. If you were to create such thing 7 years ago you'd say somebody expects a miracle out of you. I don't get why so many people have trouble recognizing it now as such.

keybored 26d ago

Another convert who can parrot what the detractors said/are saying and that ends with a thoughts-and-prayers socially progressive umm hope this doesn’t exarcerbate hooman differences too much. See you don’t need an LLM to summarize.

erelong 26d ago

> I had held a very different view of AI: that it was basically a stochastic parrot imo it's been not like that for a few years now (alternatively, stochastic parrots' abilities have been underestimated)

Garlef 26d ago

I don't know. What's the tl;dr here? "I'm one of the last few who needed convincing, now listen to my thoughts on what's next!"

WarmWash 26d ago

I'm continually perplexed by people's perception that AI would be incapable of generating new ideas or discoveries, even years ago. Deterministic machines do the same stuff again and again. Add entropy and they do new original stuff. Add a checker or verifier and you can filter for new stuff that is better. At the very least here, you now have evolution. There is nothing that is particularly compelling about a system that can generate new stuff that is an improvement. What's compelling if anything is the verifier, but that isn't particularly any more mysterious than LLM output already. At least not nearly as mysterious as "Meat brains have a magical ability to manifest original ideas".

lolakutty 26d ago
>Meat brains have a magical ability to manifest original ideas.. No, no. Any random sentence generator can generate original idea. Actually it is said that randomness contain all the answers. You don't need a "meat brain" to do that.
no-name-here 26d ago
> I'm continually perplexed by people's perception that AI would be incapable of generating new ideas or discoveries, even years ago. It's still an incredibly common claim, at least on places like Reddit. Perhaps Doctrow has been pushing the idea or something? And Zitron claimed that years ago AI was already as good as it was ever going to be - like Zitron, I imagine a lot of people haven't changed their opinions in recent years even as AI advanced.

kittikitti 26d ago

The number of people I've heard calling AI a "stochastic parrot" is concerning. You don't understand what is or isn't stochastic and you're parroting this phrase. You yourself are a stochastic parrot.

cindyllm 26d ago
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aquafox 26d ago

> but that an AI system may have produced new mathematical knowledge that humanity did not have before From the expose in Terence Taos blog [1], it seems the difficulty of the Navier-Stokes counter example is a delicate balancing act between having a blow-up solution and a well behaved force field. And this involves a lot of technical arguments based on already existing ideas. If this is true, then the achievement of the AI is rather to correctly navigating this balancing than inventing something completely new. [1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup-with-smooth-forcing-term-for-the-incompressible-porous-medium-boussinesq-and-incompressible-euler-equations/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup...