logoalt Hacker News

dvt • today at 5:38 PM • 6 replies • view on HN

Such a wild take to argue that current tier LLMs do any “thinking” at all. Was chatting with a friend last week and I was saying that sure AI writes much of my code these days but my cognitive load is HIGHER, as I have to constantly make sure it’s not doing something dumb.

I have to constantly make sure it’s building things in a way that will fit neatly together, in a way doesn’t over (or under) -generalize. In a way that doesn’t waste time and energy on idiotic tests that aren’t really testing anything at all.

LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think. And thinking is just a part of the human condition.


Replies

gottagocode • today at 5:42 PM

I fail to understand, in its current state, the mass hysteria around this revolution. Maybe I'm doing this wrong, but I constantly need to review and manage my agents, are we really headed to a reality where engineering mindsets are no longer needed?

➕ show 4 replies
jlhawn • today at 5:52 PM

> LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think.

This is really only true insofar as they are designed such that they output language tokens and their intermediate "chain of thought" is also done in language tokens, but now that's really only done for auditability. There are much more abstract layers before the model output layer of a single token prediciton and they could be designed to to "think" using these more abstract layers as intermediates instead like how many people think in concepts rather than words. There are even some research models on this (see Next Latent Models)[1]. Humans need to communicate in language because we don't have telepathic abilities but these models need not have such a constraint.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05963

rubikscube09 • today at 5:43 PM

over time you'll need to check it less and less. do we still check if calculators compute large sums properly?

➕ show 3 replies
warkdarrior • today at 5:42 PM

> Such a wild take to argue that current tier LLMs do any “thinking” at all.

It does not matter whether LLMs do any thinking, or "thinking." The only thing that matters is whether they produce similar results to human thinking, even if it's through a different process (or no process at all). When a company decides to deploy an AI-powered customer service representative, it is not because the AI bot goes through the same thinking process as a human when answering a customer's request.

➕ show 1 reply
dist-epoch • today at 6:13 PM

The bigger shock is that programming and solving Millenium Prize math problems requires zero thinking.