Comment by zahlman

Comment by zahlman a day ago

> LLM's do not think, understand, reason, reflect, comprehend and they never shall. ... It's amazing the results that LLM's are able to acheive. ... it also makes sense as to why it would, just look at the volume of human knowledge

Not so much amazing as bewildering that certain results are possible in spite of a lack of thinking etc. I find it highly counterintuitive that simply referencing established knowledge would ever get the correct answer to novel problems, absent any understanding of that knowledge.

andsoitis a day ago

> simply referencing established knowledge would ever get the correct answer to novel problems, absent any understanding of that knowledge.

What is a concrete example of this?

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Dilettante_ 20 hours ago

Coding seems like the most prominent example.

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- andsoitis 20 hours ago
  
  Can you tell us more?
  
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  keeda 14 hours ago
  
  Unless everybody is writing the same code to solve the same exact problems over and over again, by definition LLMs are solving novel problems every time somebody prompts them for code. Sure, the fundamental algorithms and data structures and dependencies would be the same, but they would be composed in novel ways to address unique use-cases, which describes approximately all of software engineering.
  If you want to define "novel problems" as those requiring novel algorithms and data structures etc, well, how often do humans solve those in their day-to-day coding?
  
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lossolo 19 hours ago

What problems have LLMs (so models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc, not specific purpose algorithms like MCTS tuned by humans for certain tasks like AlphaGo or AlphaFold) solved that thousands of humans worked decades on and didn't solve (so as OP said, novel)? Can you name 1-3 of them?

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- edanm 4 hours ago
  
  Wait, you're redefining novel to mean something else.
  If I prove a new math theorem, it's novel - even though it's unlikely that thousands of humans have worked on that specific theorem for decades.
  LLMs have proven novel math theorems and solved novel math problems. There are more than three examples already.
  
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