Comment by throw310822
4 hours ago
> things that have nothing to do with LLMs/AI
These are things that have to do with intelligence. Human or LLM doesn't matter.
> things that you should NOT use LLMs for / parroting existing code / not in their training data/cut-off window, it's non-public information, they don't have the computing abilities to produce meaningful results
Sorry, but I just get the picture that you have no clue of what you're talking about- though most probably you're just in denial. This is one on the most surprising things about the emergence of AI: the existence of a niche of people that is hell-bent on denying its existence.
> intelligence. Human or LLM doesn't matter.
Being enthusiastic about a technology isn't incompatible with objective scrutiny. Throwing-up an ill-defined "intelligence" in the air certainly doesn't help with that.
Where I stand is where measured and fact-driven (aka. scientists) people do, operating with the knowledge (derived from practical evidence¹) that LLMs have no inherent ability to reason, while making a convincing illusion of it as long as the training data contains the answer.
> Sorry, but I just get the picture that you have no clue of what you're talking about- though most probably you're just in denial.
This isn't a rebuttal. So, what is it? An insult? Surely that won't help make your case stronger.
You call me clueless, but at least I don't have to live with the same cognitive dissonances as you, just to cite a few:
- "LLMs are intelligent, but when given a trivially impossible task, they happily make stuff up instead of using their `intelligence` to tell you it's impossible"
- "LLMs are intelligent because they can solve complex highly-specific tasks from their training data alone, but when provided with the algorithm extending their reach to generic answers, they are incapable of using their `intelligence` and the supplemented knowledge to generate new answers"
¹: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/new-apple-study-challenge...
> This isn't a rebuttal.
I don't really think it's possible to convince you. Basically everyone I talk to is using LLMs for work, and in some cases- like mine- I know for a fact that they do produce enormous amounts of value- to the point that I would pay quite some money to keep using them if my company stopped paying for them.
Yes LLMs have well known limitations, but at they're still a brand new technology in its very early stages. ChatGPT appeared little more than three years ago, and in the meantime it went from barely useful autocomplete to writing autonomously whole features. There's already plenty of software that has been 100% coded by LLMs.
"Intelligence", "understanding", "reasoning".. nobody has clear definitions for these terms, but it's a fact that LLMs in many situations act as if they understood questions, problems and context, and provide excellent answers (better than the average human). The most obvious is when you ask an LLM to analyse some original artwork or poem- something that can't be in its training data- and they come up with perfectly relevant and insightful analyses and remarks. We don't have an algorithm for that, we don't even begin to understand how those questions can be answered in any "mechanical" sense, and yet it works. This is intelligence.