logoalt Hacker News

applfanboysbgontoday at 2:20 PM2 repliesview on HN

Solving obscure puzzle samples that approximately ~0 humans on Earth ever attempted to solve, mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence. DeepBlue has been outperforming the best humans at a specific puzzle-like task since the last century.

Do any of the people proclaiming this shit actually use these models? No matter how many headlines are coming out, every day I deal with reams of the most horrific code I've ever seen technically compile, with routine mistakes that any human would get fired for if they made.


Replies

fidotrontoday at 2:33 PM

But humans have been confusing pattern matching against known solutions for intelligence for a hundred years!

Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.

show 2 replies
pixl97today at 2:54 PM

>mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence

My dear sir, can you please lay out a dissertation of what this intelligence you speak of actually is. You seem to be much more informed than most of us here and therefore surely have made great contributions to furthering science and the arts.

/snark

It's difficult for me to be any less snarky than this even though it's not really wanted here on HN as you are pulling a kind of reverse snark. For example if I myself have lots of experience in subject X, and then by analogy apply it to subject Y to do something new in that subject, that would be called intelligent, and that would be pattern matching.

Pattern matching is a foundational building block of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without pattern matching. Pattern matching alone is not general intelligence and requires more parts to work like that.