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solomonbyesterday at 8:39 PM1 replyview on HN

I gave chatgpt 3.5 the type signature for a co-algebraic encoding of a mealy machine:

    newtype Mealy s i o = Mealy { runMealy :: (s, i) -> (s, o) }
And it gave a really impressive analysis.

Then I scrambled all the names and asked with a fresh context like:

    newtype Foo z e g = Bar { blob :: (z, e) -> (z, g) }
It got completely confused and generated a bunch of non-sense. It was at that moment I realized that LLMs don't really understand anything.

And yes I understand that a newer model would not get confused by this.


Replies

bonoboTPyesterday at 9:01 PM

In high school math class our teacher swapped out all the symbols in the epsilon delta definition of limits, and asked us what this equation expresses, and many students struggled to interpret it.

I don't think this test shows that an LLM doesn't "understand". It shows more that it has similar failure modes as humans.