logoalt Hacker News

gopher_spacetoday at 4:33 AM1 replyview on HN

How close are you to saying that a repair manual "knows" how to fix your car? I think the conversation here is really around word choice and anthropomorphization.


Replies

handoflixuetoday at 6:59 AM

The problem is, people think word choice influences capabilities: when people redefine "reasoning" or "consciousness" or so on as something only the sacred human soul can do, they're not actually changing what an LLM is capable of doing, and the machine will continue generating "I can't believe it's not Reasoning™" and providing novel insights into mathematics and so forth.

Similarly, the repair manual cannot reason about novel circumstances, or apply logic to fill in gaps. LLMs quite obviously can - even if you have to reword that sentence slightly.