Comment by trimethylpurine
25 days ago
The marketing says it does more than that. This isn't just a problem unique to LLMs either. We have laws about false advertising for a reason. It's going on all the time. In this case the tech is new so the lines are blurry. But to the technically inclined, it's very obvious where they are. LLMs are artificial, but they are not literally intelligent. Calling them "AI" is a scam. I hope that it's only a matter of time until that definition is clarified and we can stop the bullshit. The longer it goes, the worse it will be when the bubble bursts. Not to be overly dramatic, but economic downturns have real physical consequences. People somewhere will literally starve to death. That number of deaths depends on how well the marketers lied. Better lies lead to bigger bubbles, which when burst lead to more deaths. These are facts. (Just ask ChatGPT, it will surely agree with me, if it's intelligent. ;p)
How does one go about competing at the IMO without "intelligence", exactly? At a minimum it seems we are forced to admit that the machines are smarter than the test authors.
"LLM" as a marketing term seems rational. "Machine learning" also does. We can describe the technology honestly without using a science fiction lexicon. Just because a calculator can do math faster than Isaac Newton doesn't mean it's intelligent. I wouldn't expect it to invent a new way of doing math like Isaac Newton, at least.
Just because a calculator can do math faster than Isaac Newton doesn't mean it's intelligent.
Exactly, and that's the whole point. If you lack genuine mathematical reasoning skill, a calculator won't help you at the IMO. You might as well bring a house plant or a teddy bear.
But if you bring a GPT5-class LLM, you can walk away with a gold medal without having any idea what you're doing.
Consequently, analogies involving calculators are not valid. The burden of proof rests firmly on the shoulders of those who claim that an LLM couldn't invent new mathematical techniques in response to a problem that requires it.
In fact, that appears to have just happened (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664631), where an out-of-distribution proof for an older problem was found. (Meta: also note the vehement arguments in that thread regarding whether or not someone is using an LLM to post comments. That doesn't happen without intelligence, either.)
9 replies →