alt Hacker NewsLovely article well worth attention by virtue of its regard for the cultural traits of terminology and its inflections, while also debunking the pervasive lore that "AI" devices are doing anything but the merest resemblance of thinking.
It's rare to read an author who can directly face Brandolini's Law of misinformation asymmetry and not only hold his own against the bullshit but overcome it.
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CamperBob2 • today at 12:44 AM
TIL that the "merest resemblance of thinking" is enough to take gold at IMO.
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You're dismissing LLM-generated text as the "merest resemblance of thinking" when the way it resembles thinking is becoming increasingly useful.
When I prompt a coding agent to fix a bug, it outputs text describing a hypothesis and more text that results in running shell commands to test the hypothesis. If the output shows that it guessed wrong, it outputs more text to test a different hypothesis, and more text to edit code, and in the end, the bug is fixed.
The text resembles the output of a reasoning process closely enough to actually work. Maybe, for some purposes, it doesn't matter if it's "real" or not?
What does "real" reasoning do for us that the imitation doesn't do? Does it come up with better hypotheses? Is it better at testing them? Sometimes, but not always. Human reasoning is more expensive, less available, and sometimes gets poor results.