If you spend time with the higher-tier (paid) reasoning models, you’ll see they already operate in ways that are effectively deductive (i.e., behaviorally indistinguishable) within the bounds of where they operate well. So not novel theorem proving. But give them scheduling constraints, warranty/return policies, travel planning, or system troubleshooting, and they’ll parse the conditions, decompose the problem, and run through intermediate steps until they land on the right conclusion. That’s not "just chained prediction". It’s structured reasoning that, in practice, outperforms what a lot of humans can do effectively.

When the domain is checkable (e.g., dates, constraints, algebraic rewrites, SAT-style logic), the outputs are effectively indistinguishable from human deduction. Outside those domains, yes it drifts into probabilistic inference or “reading between the lines.” But to dismiss it all as “not deduction at all” ignores how far beyond surface-level token prediction the good models already are. If you want to dismiss all that by saying “but it’s just prediction,” you’re basically saying deduction doesn’t count unless it’s done by a human. That’s just redefining words to try and win an Internet argument.

They do quite a bit more than that. There's a good bit of reasoning that comes into play and newer models (really beginning with o3 on the ChatGPT side) can do multi-step reasoning where it'll first determine what the user is actually seeking, then determine what it needs to provide that, then begin the process of response generation based on all of that.

This is not a surprise, just one more data point that LLMs fundamentally suck and cannot be trusted.

Huh? LLMs are not perfect and are not expert-level in every single thing ever. But that doesn't mean they suck. Nothing does everything. A great LLM can fail to produce a perfect original proof but still be excellent at helping people adjust the tone of their writing or understanding interactions with others or developing communication skills, developing coping skills, or learning new subjects quickly. I've used ChatGPT for everything from landscaping to plumbing successfully. Right now it's helping to guide my diet, tracking macros and suggesting strategies and recipes to remain on target.

LLMs are a tool with use cases where they work well and use cases where they don't. They actually have a very wide set of use cases. A hammer doesn't suck just because I can't use it to cut my grass. That's not a use case where it excels. But a hammer is a perfect tool for hammering nails into wood and it's pretty decent at putting holes in drywall. Let's not throw out LLMs just because they don't do everything everywhere perfectly at all times. They're a brand new novel tool that's suddenly been put into millions of peoples' hands. And it's been massively improved over the past few years to expand its usefulness. But it's still just a tool.

I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

If/when true AGI is achieved, only a fool would announce it. What would announcing it do for you? Make you famous? Rich? Cool. Know what's better than all that?

Not telling a damn soul and using the AGI quietly to do whatever the Hell you want. If you want to be rich, the AGI will tell you how to become rich. If you want to be famous, the AGI will tell you how to become famous. You can do both. And you don't have to stop there. A real, vastly superior AGI enables the person controlling it to do anything. The second you tell people about it, you'll lose control over it and then you're the famous idiot who did a cool thing one time. Kids in elementary school will recite your name back on a test. And you could have had everything.

Anyone smart enough to crack AGI can't also be stupid enough to advertise when they do it.

I read it as 4.5 didn't end up performing as well as hoped in the real world and 4.1 being a direct iteration of 4o rather than 4.5.

They're operating with parallel code lines because each is targeting different use cases.

These are all issues directly related to regulation and unnecessary red tape created out of NIMBYism and irrational fear around radiation. India, Canada, and China aren't stupid. They're building and/or modernizing nuclear power plants like crazy because they're so effective at reliable baseline power, which renewables simply are not. In the US, we force years - sometimes decades - of reviews and permits and defending court cases and other bullshit unrelated to the construction and operation of clean, safe nuclear power.

The other issue going to cost is that the US - again, stupidly - bars reuse of high energy spent fuel. If you simply separate the low energy (relatively safe, but useless for generating power) waste from the high energy fuel remaining and feed the high energy stuff back in, you can extract nearly all the energy, save a ton of fuel costs, mine less fuel, and have vastly less volume of waste and vastly less energetic waste.

Let's assume some sort of absolute mandate were passed to build 5 CANDU-6 (known, proven, safe, reliable design) reactors. No reviews, no permits, no red tape, no lawsuits. Just build the damn things now. You can get one operational in ~3.5 years, all of them in about 4ish years. South Korea and China have built PWRs in 5. Assuming we also lifted the ban on fuel reprocessing, CANDU-6 plants will produce power at a cost of 5-6 cents per kWh, yielding a retail price of 13-17 cents per kWh. US average is about 16.2 cents, California has rates pushing 50 cents. But we're too stupid to get out of our own way and just do it, so we'll keep strangling the poor and middle class economically.

If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.

I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.

Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.

I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.

Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.

If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.

Your absolutely right. Population is around 132k. Comes out to about $7,620.21 per person. The only thing I think they could do here would be some science fiction, like drill down to the earths mantel and allow lava to flow and create new land mass, while the heat energy creates freshwater. Considering the crust is about 10 miles thick, ya, science fiction.

Kiribati has money from years of selling off phosphate mining rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Kind of a neat story out that way. Nauru is probably the most famous of these, but there's dozens of islands in the area that acted as rest stops of migratory birds, and as a result deposited millions of tons of bird shit and seeds on what was essentially volcanic rock, atolls, and uplifted reefs. Seeds do what seeds do and these grew into ecologies that covered up the bird shit.

In the late 1800's early 1900's chemistry wasn't what it is today, and bird shit phosphate was used in everything from field fertilizers to gunpowder. Nauru and Kiribati were sitting on white gold, ships were constantly in and out of the area hauling away millions of tons of white phosphate powder.

If you don't replace what you've taken out, you leave a void for seawater to get in through.

What did Kiribati and Nauru do with their billions? Pissed it away. The government gave a huge portion of the money to the residents, who did things like import Mercedes Benz's. Why would you import a car on an atoll with one road? Or in Nauru's case, an Island barely 2 miles across?

Eventually the rest of the world got better at synthesizing phosphate on a large scale and no longer needed to dig up the bird shit.

Real interesting history around that time and Guano though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's mimicked intelligence. You're absolutely right that - under the hood - there's not the sort of traditionally cognitive processing happening that we might consider intelligence. That can be a distinction without a difference if the output is the same, and for quite a lot of things, they're becoming indistinguishable.

I think the real challenge for LLMs specifically is the training data. Between the limits placed technically and legally, malicious poisoning already happening, and the breakdown of function seen when LLM generated content is repeatedly added to its training data (i.e., "model collapse"). However, I also think that by the time we start to see major effects of this, the LLMs of today will have evolved to largely work around this limitation and the underlying process for generating output will be far less susceptible to the problems seen today. Time will tell whether that's overly optimistic, but there's a ton of development in this space toward better approaches.

Two decades ago, everybody and their brother were charging head-first toward six figure salaries (those used to mean something) and the easy life of playing arcade games at a startup waiting to become millionaires. Anyone who thought this was sustainable - particularly for the general population - was failing to think. Coding ability, like most things, is an innate skill advanced by training. You can take people with little innate talent and train them to get better just like you can take Average Joe and teach him to swim faster. But Average Joe swimmer and Average Jane coder are never going to be particularly valuable in that role long term. Once the stupid money turned off, value had to be reassessed, and lots of Galaga arcades went up on eBay.

Never play to the fads. Find something you're good at naturally that's valuable long term, develop your skills to become great at it, and market yourself appropriately.

That is not an entirely unfair observation.

Ahh found the 2b2t player.