alt Hacker NewsTo those saying this is not surprising, yes it will be surprising to the general public who are being served ads from huge companies like MS or OpenAI saying LLMs can help with their accounting, help them close deals by crunching the numbers in seconds, write complex code for them etc etc.
This is important information for anyone to understand who thinks these systems are thinking, reasoning, and learning from them or that they’re having a conversation with them i.e. 90% of users of LLMs.
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Quick sanity check: you're susceptible to pretty irresistible optical illusions which would never fool a VLM, does it mean you're not thinking? In fact, with a non-monospaced font I also have trouble determining whether these parens are balanced, and have to select them with the mouse, i.e. use a "dumb" tool, to make sure.
Reminder that "thinking" is an ill-defined term like others, and the question whether they "think" is basically irrelevant. No intelligent system, human or machine, will ever have zero error rate, due to the very nature of intelligence (another vague term). You have to deal with that the same way you deal with it in humans - either treat bugs as bugs and build systems resilient to bugs, or accept the baseline error rate if it's low enough.
> saying LLMs can help with their accounting, help them close deals by crunching the numbers in seconds, write complex code for them etc etc.
Why do you think the results of this paper contradict these claims at all?