Why invent a new "aithink" verb when we already have "think"?

Hey AI, who is being more reasonable in this conversation?

User 2:50PM
Who is being more reasonable in this conversation?

[Snip]

Model 2:50PM
ThinkingThoughts
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Rei is substantially more reasonable in this conversation, both in terms of technical accuracy and conversational etiquette.
ere is a breakdown of why:

1. Technical Accuracy and Explanatory Value

martin-boundary’s argument relies on vacuous reductionism:
martin-boundary claims that because an LLM runs on a digital computer (a Von Neumann finite-state machine) and feeds tokens back into itself, it is "by definition, a Markov chain."

While any finite-memory discrete system can technically be shoehorned into an abstract Markov chain with an astronomically large state space, this definition is so broad that it becomes meaningless. Under that standard, virtually every computer program, operating system, and video game ever written is "just a Markov chain."

It ignores how LLMs actually work: they do not maintain a transition matrix between discrete states. Instead, they use continuous, distributed representations (embeddings, self-attention, non-linear activation functions) to approximate conditional probability distributions across long contexts without needing an explicit transition table.

Rei’s rebuttal addresses the actual computer science:

Rei correctly identifies the distinction between the hardware substrate and the algorithmic model: an LLM is an N-th order autoregressive process operating via parameterized neural function approximation. Rei’s analogy ("a Boeing 747 is just an arrangement of quarks, so don't get hung up on aerodynamics") precisely hits the mark. Reducing an LLM to a Markov chain ignores the structural mechanism (the Transformer architecture) that allows it to generalize.

Rei correctly notes the curse of dimensionality: an actual discrete Markov model matching an LLM's context window would require an exponential state-space transition table (VN, where V is vocabulary size and N is sequence length) that would vastly exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe.

2. Argumentation and Conduct

Rei argues in good faith:

Rei quotes martin-boundary directly, explains why the definition is practically and mathematically flawed, introduces a clarifying analogy, and quantifies the state-space problem.

martin-boundary relies on hand-waving and ad hominem:

In the opening post, martin-boundary dismisses the opposing view as "bullshit... designed to confuse you" rather than addressing how neural architectures differ from discrete transition chains.

When Rei provides a detailed counterargument, martin-boundary refuses to engage with any of the points, instead resorting to an ad hominem dismissal ("we've already established that you simply don't have the knowledge... and I'm not going to repeat myself").

Conclusion

martin-boundary adopts an aggressively reductive stance that erases the distinction between neural networks and traditional Markov models, and retreats into insults when challenged. Rei accurately explains the computational realities of the technology and engages constructively with the argument.

"A labor union wants to be, and often is, the exclusive provider (that is, seller) of labor to a company or industry. "

Labor Union do not provide exclusively labor to companies. What they do is have the power of collective bargaining, job protection, safety - which is utterly different to being "exclusive provider of job".
You may confusing normal labor union, with hiring hall union (e.g. in construction/actors/voice actor). That is a widely different type of union. Most union are NOT hiring hall union.

Feel free to correct me.

Why in the world would anyone think that an LLM would know what products humans would want to buy? To the LLM, all the products are merely words. Just descriptions. It cannot perceive anything about these products, but only knows of them indirectly via words. Further, all the LLM knows about what things are appealing to humans is also from words.

The whole thing is absurd really. It reminds me of something like Futurama where Bender is trying to cook food for humans. Or Star Trek and Data is trying to do something human but failing at it. Just not nearly as entertaining to watch this store fail though.

1. It did not happen

2. The two papers are not similar in their approaches. And the OpenAI one is more innovative and tackles a much harder problem (Buckmaster had only solved Euler).

3. Buckmaster distorted what happened. For example, the claim that he asked for Levent to be removed from his own paper the paper because he worked for OpenAI? The context is that one option that OpenAI proposed to Buckmaster was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It was in the context of having Tristan rewrite OpenAI's proof to take claim for it that Bubeck said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because he felt it would be inappropriate to invite an Anthropic employee to rewrite an OpenAI paper.

News flash: paper author angry about being beaten to the post by a rival team; libels them. Details at 11.

The training materials say it is the goal. So if your personal beliefs are not so aligned, it is a pretty big fucking clue to reconsider.

And in case it is not obvious enough to the recruit, they explicitly tell them so. Later in the training they will explain that it will be you duty to go into harms way to help others. If you can't do that reconsider being here.

To an extent, but to people going in first responder roles there is often an element of this being a calling. Not just some regular job with a paycheck.

Outliers, not the norm. Are there those in law enforcement that don't have the intelligence, temperament, or judgement for the job? Of course there are. But they are the exception that gets all the attention. Because most go about their job in a decent manner and or too boring for a journalist to have anything to do with them.

Confirm not, just an anecdote that likely create the opinion expressed above.

Quite familiar with it. And the police and military include the concept of illegal orders into their training as a result.

Most of the time they are arguing something I didn't actually say. So sometimes I have to elaborate on what I actually said to be clear. And sometimes their argument are known political fabrications.

I do question them, when their rebuttals are rational and in good faith and not off on some straw man or otherwise on a tangent.

Oh I could do a proper debate, its just that slashdot is not a venue worth much time.

The typical rebutter is so partisan there is no hope of credibility, my comments are sometimes oriented to the more rational reader that is not actually speaking up.

Yeah, I used to do that too. Decided to stop bothering with the quotation marks a couple months ago.

We're not going to spend the rest of our lives putting quotations around words when talking about models. "Think" and "reason" the words we have in English for what is going on. No need to tiptoe around it. Again: models are not humans. They are not the same as us. But those are the words we have in English for what they're doing.

They are, by definition, Markov chains.

Even in your attempt to be pedantic here (in which the universe and everything within it is a Markov chain), no, it's not. The hardware state is Markovian but the linguistic processing is a Nth order autoregressive process; it depends on the N previous states. Also, your argument is akin to saying "a Boeing 747 is just an arrangement of quarks, so don't get hung up on aerodynamics." it entirely ignores the relevant architectural details, and instead substitutes a model that blows up exponentially explodes in size within a small number of states.

If you tried to build a Markov model to do what LLMs do, and could store one probability in every unit of Planck space across every unit of Planck time, it couldn't handle a prompt longer than about 2/3rds of the first sentence to A Tale of Two Cities.

What consumer oriented VR headset is NOT an experiment in progress? Various human computer interaction issues and ergonomics issues are still being worked out.

Is the scrap value likely to be more than the hauling fee to the scap yard? :-)

Nope. Asking for an interview on site might be expected. Following in a car is suspicious and starts signaling more activist than journalist.

Did they make it very clear to the bank and credit card issuers that company officers can not ask for an increase in the credit limit, or to apply for any additional lines of credit?

I'd specify a legal, safe, running, registerable, and insurable car. :-)

But is it sending hallucinated reports and banks statements to management and investors?

These brownouts are usually a second or two. With UPS on desktop machines they are irrelevant. I only need to reset the clock on the oven and microwave when convenient. Everything else quickly resets.

Another way to describe things is that the rolling blackouts seem to have been successfully replaced with rolling reductions in air conditioning. I have not seen a notification of a blackout in recent years except for scheduled maintenance. Notifications regarding automatic thermostat reductions are increasingly common.