It's answered in the article. The argument is not that giant creatures can't exist, but that they cannot exist as a simple scaled-up version of the otherwise identical smaller version.
i can’t read the article to see what the specifics are, but assuming it’s essentially the square-cube law it doesn’t mean giant creatures can’t exist, it’s that small creatures can’t scale to be giants while being unchanged.
again i’m guessing, but if the conclusion is something like “if giant humans existed, X, Y and Z wouldn’t work”. then a “giant humans” would have to be something decidedly non-human.
Crazy how intelligence is cheap, efficient and commonplace now.
We humans better refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant
If it were commonplace, there wouldn't be a post and discussion about it. Cheap? Arguable - while it didn't cost thousands, it wasn't free. Cheap is in the eye of the beholder. Efficient...How do we even measure that? The massive infrastructure and training to take a product to the point where someone could do this is massive. Ignoring everything behind the scenes and acting like one session and result is the whole picture of efficiency doesn't seem right. And no, nothing produced by AI makes skills irrelevant. That is the whole ongoing argument of whether people are losing cognitive ability by moving their thinking to AI.
Overall, this is an impressive proof of capability. But I wouldn't take that proof as anything more than what it is.
Seconded on the "not cheap" argument here. I've spent $25 worth of tokens completing a one-week task in an afternoon, or rather my company spent the money. I would never have personally felt OK with throwing this much money after some prompting back and forth for a few hours, one lazy Saturday afternoon. I ran the risk of not finding the solution before the token usage would be too high for me to want to carry on, if I was my own credit card linked to the account.
Of course money in this situation is a bit of a funny measurement, right, because if I was able to take the rest of the week off as soon as I had solved the one-week problem, then I would have no problem at all throwing even $100 worth of tokens at it, so I could enjoy a nice 4-day "mini-vacation".
How cheap "cheap" is, is indeed "in the eye of the beholder".
It's not sarcasm. If I had to pay $25 to perform my work from an ever-growing pile of projects, I would be losing money. That's not "cheap intelligence" for me. It certainly is for my employer, though, because for the mere price of $25 extra per day they can get 4*X the product per period of time.
In Scrum terms my personal velocity grows by a factor of four or more with access to agentic AI workload, but if it means that I will just be asked to "consume" 4*X more Story Points per sprint, I'm not the winner in the end, my employer is. If they asked me to complete X Story Points per sprint regardless of my velocity, and they let me take the days off when I was done, I would be the winner. But that's not how it works.
AI is "Cheap" for the person/organization that gets more product for less money, not for the individual person building the product faster.
If I'm getting paid for the work, I'm happy to leverage the LLMs so I can do more. If I'm paying for the work, I expect more from it.
For hobbyist stuff, where I'm not expecting to receive money? LLMs let me do things I otherwise wouldn't have done.
I've agreed with thoughts like "the LLM wrote the code, surely it's not worth sharing" or "I could just have the LLM write my own version of that". I'd also wondered about my own personal projects, surely "an LLM could have written all of this". -- But how I feel about that changes a bit based on how much it'd take the LLMs to get the same output.
I mostly agree, these are things that couldn't or weren't solved with abundant capital at all, and now they are being solved
it went from not having a price, to having one, and we are trying to retroactively transpose economic viability or economic existence to it from some parallel and prior time.
A counter argument: A strong distinction between "intelligence" (understanding what is) and "values/principles" (understanding what ought to be) was characteristic of much early modern European philosophy from Descartes to Kant, which received its influential strong formulation from David Hume.
But trying to maintain this distinction leads to insuperable difficulties. Our conceptual framework for understanding the world are always value-laden. There is no "view from nowhere", no historically unconditioned set of values or concepts. Your framing, in which "values" are external to "intelligence" and must be imposed on it (on pain of intelligence being "value-neutral"), leads inevitably to the dead end of "AI Alignment", "superintelligence", etc. Which is a kind of pseudo-theology.
"We humans better [be] refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant."
In light of the untenability of a strong fact/value or intelligence/ethics distinction, I would suggest this alternative advice: humans should focus on critical appropriation and extension of the received wisdom, whether that comes to us directly from human beings or indirectly through an LLM. Perhaps this is compatible with the spirit of your original suggestion.
It's still clear that LLMs lack spatial reasoning, either in the concrete or abstract, and while that sort of reasoning has been downplayed by academia for at least a century it is fundamental to technology and industry. (And many would say for science and mathematics too).
They will, however, get there as well either directly or as interfaces to models that do, and your core point stands.
"Lack" isn't the right word. "Lacking" is more like it.
If there was a deep fundamental inability, we wouldn't see things like newer generations of LLMs consistently improving on ARC-AGI series (heavy spatial reasoning loading) and SimpleBench (a lot of commonsense + spatial reasoning components).
In a way, it's a surprise that LLMs, notoriously lacking any sort of embodied experience, can even get this close to human baselines on tasks like this.
My takeaway is that text is a far richer modality than anyone has expected - and that high end LLMs are often sharp and flexible enough to recognize their weak points and substitute their strengths. I.e. all the LLMs implementing A* to optimally solve pathfinding in ARC-AGI-3 tasks, often unprompted.
There might still be unrealized gains there from true depth-unbounded recurrence, or maybe from finding better ways to integrate modalities in training. But clearly, a "fundamental limit" it ain't.
> "Lack" isn't the right word. "Lacking" is more like it.
Yeah, that's fair.
> My takeaway is that text is a far richer modality than anyone has expected - and that high end LLMs are often sharp and flexible enough to recognize their weak points and substitute their strengths. I.e. all the LLMs implementing A* to optimally solve pathfinding in ARC-AGI-3 tasks, often unprompted.
I agree and disagree with this. I think we've learned a lot of humans are more text based than we thought, but conversely I'm not persuaded what non-textual task reasoning LLMs are doing is necessarily text based, just that models have grown large enough for other reasoning modes to conceivably be hiding in the parameter space.
As I mentioned elsewhere, like many others I find LLMs work entirely by example, and reaching for A* when pathfinding is the single obvious thing to do. In cases where the magic key word is not mentioned and the problem cannot be identified as "pathfinding" (or some other trigger with a highly specific widely documented solution) they will struggle, yet the moment the trigger is hit they get there very fast. This is why prompting remains such an art form.
Fable is the first one I've encountered that is capable of serious open ended 3D programming in ways that suggest it has some grasp of the spatial aspects of the problem (not merely symbolic manipulation of the vectors etc.), but it still misses optimization opportunities a human will find glaringly obvious based on spatially predictable bounds etc.
Grown? LLMs were always "large enough for other reasoning modes to conceivably be hiding in the parameter space".
Basic LLMs don't reason in text, and never did. They use it as an interface - for input, output and some of the intermediate products. Heavy use of those "pseudo-recurrence" intermediates in "reasoning models" is a relatively late post-training adaptation. But the process that happens between those endpoints is not at all text-based. What happens in the hidden dimension is part "output logit domain", tied to probability distributions over possible output tokens, and part "incomprehensible concept-space madness".
The latter being where things like latent world models live. LLMs develop partial world models, right in pre-training, despite not being explicitly forced to - because it brings them closer to heaven of accurate next token prediction.
And yes, larger models like Fable seem to be better at spatial reasoning. Maybe because their large size increases the sample efficiency and improves generalization, allowing them to absorb the sparse signal of "spatial reasoning" in the training text better. Maybe because this extra size means more layers, allowing for deeper latent space reasoning in lieu of true recurrence. Maybe because the default "next token prediction" reward underrates rare spatial reasoning challenges, and the model only starts to "get good" at them once the other sources of loss reduction are heavily depleted. Maybe because no true recurrence is suboptimal for spatial reasoning architecturally. But it is what it is. Spatial reasoning gains in LLMs are extractable, but extracting them is nontrivial.
I will be posting something to that effect later this week. (Hopefully).
Basically current gen LLMs apparently do spatial reasoning the way they seemingly do everything else: by reference to previous example. I didn't see them work out which known example to use for a given problem until specifically prompted, in my case by accident.
If you ask an LLM, "what known example did you use to solve this?" it is very likely to cite something plausible-sounding. That absolutely doesn't mean it is what it actually did. It is trying to give the "right answer" and please.
> If you ask an LLM, "what known example did you use to solve this?" it is very likely to cite something plausible-sounding. That absolutely doesn't mean it is what it actually did. It is trying to give the "right answer" and please.
That's not what I said happened though. It didn't solve the problem (for weeks) until I (accidentally) told it which example it happened to know was relevant, and then it solved it in hours.
On a token level, text tokens are orders of magnitude more information dense than visual tokens.
You don't have to do much statistical analysis to figure out what is meant by the token string "cat under a tree". However you need to do an enormous amount to encode any permutation of pixels that show a cat under a tree from the set of all possible pixels arrangements that illustrate that (along with the massive fringes of ambiguity).
Everybody can be an armchair mathematician now. Just fling some thoughts in the direction of your AI setup and let it do breadth first search with AI based pruning heuristics.
If you really believe this, try to use GPT 5.6 to prove an open problem you know nothing about. You might get lucky, but if you don't, you will soon discover that 5.6 can make "progress" towards a theorem without actually getting anywhere pretty much indefinitely.
I generally agree, though direction, intuition, and domain knowledge are still relevant. Your breadth-first-search framing feels right, but you still need a sense of which paths are worth following, and you need to know when to trust the results.
I’ve been doing more math as a hobby in the past few weeks — working on lesser-known conjectures and exploring proofs of hard theorems — than I could have managed over the previous several years. It’s an exciting time.
I imagine there are hundreds of thousands of people doing this, yet all we seem to get is a handful of solved problems. So it would seem the success rate is extremely low.
Intelligence on its own is not very useful though. We put it on a pedestal because it creates huge potential when paired with other things, wisdom, discipline, empathy, but on its own?
You've not seen how they react to noobs asking physics questions, I think.
Even when you've got an interesting idea, if you're an enthusiastic amateur who don't yet know enough to phrase the question right but does actually know the basics, they'll put you in the same category as the people who think healing crystals can power hyperspace telepathy with Anubis: "oh no not another one".
LLMs have infinite patience, but unfortunately come (came?) with too much sycophancy, giving even more people far too much confidence.
That view is incredibly reductionist. It really is an efficient encoding of how nature behaves. It might be a human construct, but given how best it allows to understand nature (through principles of physics), it is uncanny to be any different from the language of nature.
Reminds me of Wigner's Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences [0].
Nature has no language. Language is a human tool to imperfectly describe nature. Putting language before nature is magical thinking (also known as Platonism).
Yes, of course mathematics is a tool to model nature as accurately as we could. That still doesn't mean mathematics is as trivial or frivolous as manipulating symbols.
At a very high level mathematics is basically 100% text/symbolic rewriting. You start from some set of postulate assumed true and you do your thing to get a new different set of equivalent assertions in a form that is more useful.
I don’t know if LLMs will kill the working-mathematicians but at least seem like that it doesn’t seem absurd to imagine LLMs will be good at math…
I can't stop wondering myself.... I'm writing some software with AI and wondering, why am I doing this? Will anyone need this? Will anyone have money to buy this?
Best I've come up with is we'll need to be adopted by technofeudlaist overlords to be our patrons like in the roman days
> Best I've come up with is we'll need to be adopted by technofeudlaist overlords to be our patrons like in the roman days
Continually progressing AI (combined with our current socioeconomic systems) throws a lot of uncertainty into our mid to long term future, but I don't think this is going to be what happens.
There are billions more of "us" than of "them", people don't respond well en masse to a drastic worsening of their societal status and "they" are lagging very far behind on building their robot armies.
If we poorly navigate this transition the outcome should be worrying them more than it worries us.
> There are billions more of "us" than of "them", people don't respond well en masse to a drastic worsening of their societal status and "they" are lagging very far behind on building their robot armies.
Fortunately, yes, those robot armies do seem to be rather behind schedule*.
However, even if Musk dies of old age before anything like the Optimus can be connected to useful artificial intelligence, it can still be driven by the common joke a few years back that "AI" really stood for "Actually Indians".
When all the people currently upset about "immigrants coming here taking our jobs" discover those same people are now staying home and remote-working those same jobs over a VR headset and a Starlink connection... my guess is that by this point, Musk will have no political allies left.
> If we poorly navigate this transition the outcome should be worrying them more than it worries us.
It can screw everyone over. Literal communism was invented in response to Laissez-faire capitalism, and while Laissez-faire died with the Great Depression, the form of capitalism which succeeded it in the USA came into conflict with the USSR and gave us the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.
The infinite monkey theorem assumes random distribution of symbols*.
Given the tokenizers have a vocabulary in the 10k-100k range, "a million attempts" will generally still only get the first token of the answer correct.
Even really rubbish models, e.g. talkie, the "what if we only use pre-1930s data to train a model?"** model, had to be almost all the way to the right answer to reach the really low HumanEval pass@100 score of ~0.04 (I'm only eyeballing the relevant chart).
* Actual monkeys not being like this is, while amusing, irrelevant
Even if every atom in the universe were a supercomputer generating a trillion trillion random characters every second since the Big Bang, the chance of producing Hamlet would still be essentially zero.
Crazy that these mega corporations still bow to the requests of countries.
Would they do the same of any important actor requesting censorship? like if Elon or Bezos make a request, they'd get ignored, even though they're more powerful than Kuwait.
Elon and Bezos aren't more powerful than Kuwait. Kuwait is a sovereign government, with authority to write laws, raise an army, and do whatever it wants with its 5M+ citizens (draft them, imprison people, execute people, etc.) with pretty much no consequence unless they're absurdly reckless. There is more to power than money.
I think the argument being made is that they don't have any meaningful power over Meta's corporate decision-makers, even if they do have power over some other people.
Right, but if you control access to a market of millions of people, a lot of companies will do what you say (i.e. follow your laws) in order to retain access to that market, as well as protect their local employees from jail. I would say that counts as meaningful power.
They also shipped 0 barrels of oil last month, the basis for 90% of gov revenue, 50% of its GDP. Clearly their faux workforce of subsidized "natives" and "indentured servants" is heading for a fulminant blowup, with no one in charge with the faintest clue towards mitigation.
So now there's no power, no money. Hence the attempts at message control. I don't think it's for Meta to soften their fall.
The fact it gets public shows you are a b-tiwr customer, the bigbs have a sort of psychological warfare suit available. You dont loose your account, you loose your sanity.
Google (including YouTube) has black-holed content at the request of the Chinese and Pakistani governments and in response to domestic Muslim pressure groups. This effects content shown everywhere, including within the United States:
Did you forget that Elon literally bought out an entire major international social media platform and fundamentally re-oriented its algorithmic editorial policy? He did a lot more than "ask". He literally took the thing over and personally dictated censorship.
Well, homosexuality is criminalized in Kuwait for example, do we see Meta banning accounts because of it? Suddenly the company doesn’t follow the country’s regulations. Meta aligns with israel narrative (notorious against anything that goes against that), and it seems that person account wasn’t aligned with that, so they got banned, that’s the real reason, it’s never about following other countries’ laws or whatever, just a legal justification so the company isn’t directly blamed for it, selective censorship.
Hey HN, wrote this blog posts into various chapters as I realized many of the topics I studied empirically converge to the same principles, which I think should be studied more for those trying to understand what this reality is all about.
Funny people still call that "simulation hypothesis". At some point they should try to do some Past lives regressions or Out of body experience (astral projection). Then they'll know for sure what this reality is about.
I would consider this if someone was able to demonstrate a way to distinguish these phenomena from altered states of mind (i.e. hallucinations). We know and can demonstrate that the human psyche can easily be manipulated in various ways (psychological manipulation, drugs, magnetic fields, sleep depravation, stress, etc.) to cause such experiences.
Some actual evidence for for "past life regressions" and "astral projection" would be nice...
PLR is real, read the works of Michael newton and others. Over 8000 PRL from people of all kind of age and background describe the same things happening once we pass on the other side.
Definitely not hallucinations. Actually scary how people still think that instead of exploring for themselves.
Newton was a hypnotherapist. I'm sorry to say this, but hypnosis is precisely the kind of altering a person's state of mind to make it highly susceptible to both deliberate and unintentional suggestion. This has been well documented and researched for decades at this point.
The fact that to this day not a single so called "PRL" has uncovered hitherto unknown, yet verifiable information (e.g. archaeological sites like sunken cities or translations of ancient scripts) points to suggestion (even if unintentional) rather than paranormal phenomena.
He surely started Libyan War by bombing the hell out the government forces and creating power vacuum. The war is still ravaging the country to this day
You seem to have come from another timeline, where that's reality. Wikipedia says:
> On 19 March 2011, a NATO-led coalition began a military intervention into the ongoing Libyan Civil War to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSCR 1973). The UN Security Council passed the resolution with ten votes in favour and five abstentions, with the stated intent to have "an immediate ceasefire in Libya, including an end to the current attacks against civilians, which it said might constitute 'crimes against humanity'
but I guess that's fake news...
But I'm more interested about how you can travel between timelines. Is it with a portal gun like in Rick and Morty?
Can you let Obama know Libya wasn't his fault and he bears absolutely no responsibility? He seems to be living in that alternate reality - you'd think he would be a better judge of what reality existed, but alas not everyone is as observant as you. Surely the US cannot be held responsible for any action of NATO, they have no relation with that organization at all.
While you're there you should also let Hilary Clinton know that she wasn't a war hawk either, and the no-fly zone just spontaneously appeared with no US involvement at all.
What are you saying exactly? Military intervention is not a war? Obama did not play a decisive role in starting it (mainly to sway away attention from the dragging Afghanistan war which he promised to end)? Or UN mandate makes it somewhat ok, considering NATO broke conditions of the UN resolution already in the first weeks of bombing (which was promptly objected by UN security Council members).
Make no mistake. Obama started this war for PR reasons. Had it not been for NATO bombing Libya would still exist as a state instead of a failed entity it is now.
By this logic Russia did not start Ukraine war but merely joined the internal conflict started by Ukraine in 2014.
It was hardly a civil war before NATO bombing, but rather protests which were brutally squashed by Gaddafi forces. Opposition lacked any means to wage a way before NATO started supplying them with arms too.
So in the timeline you're from, the Crimean invasion also was an internal conflict... interesting!
Also there, civilized societies should look away and just let it happen when people fighting oppression is being slaughtered. Well, that's quite similar to this timeline, because that's what's happening in Gaza and being ignored by "The West".
Well, oppression is exactly what people in Crimea and Donbass viewed Maidan events and did not want to have anything to do with this new Ukraine. Go do a research on Crimea referendum or gallups done by Pew or such and you will find out that secession was and still is the most popular option. And sure as hell people of Crimea do not want to be part of Ukraine again.
The UN mandate which NATO were given to use military force only to protect civilians was used as a figleaf to pursue a regime change operation instead.
In the context of that regime change operation they killed many civilians and left a humanitarian catastrophe in their wake. The country is beyond fucked but Hillary did get to say "we came, we saw, he died" afterwards, underscoring the lie. So mission accomplished?
For some reason the UN security council stopped approving NATO "humanitarian" operations after that and Russia started treating NATO expansion as an imperialist, existential threat.
He started a number of color revolutions though out MENA?
And let us not forget his assassination of an American citizen by drone strike for visiting the place of his fathers death, also assassinated by drone strike.
And if we want a “fun fact,” he is the only Nobel Peace winner to bomb and kill another, as commander and chief his forces bombed and killed innocents in a Doctor’s Without Borders outpost in Afghanistan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike)
I think there's a very high bar of proof to "Americans are responsible for a popular revolution" when in practice there was a huge amount of effort by individuals on the ground, for example in Tahrir Square.
Obama did not make Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire.
Can we please stop propagating the flimsy conspiracies about the 2011 revolutions? They started entirely organically, but some unfortunately devolved into wider conflicts.
At worst, this conspiracy infantilizes Arab populations by removing their agency. At best, it’s false marketing for the CIA and other agencies.
Yeah two unpopular wars he did not start and spent a lot of effort figuring out how to get out of. He ended one and his vice president later ended the other.
Did Obama start the Afghanistan war? or the Iraq war?
Yes, he could exit those countries hastily. But that has its own cost. Getting in wars is the easy part. Getting out of one is the hard part. Ask Putin who went into Ukraine on a 3-day limited special military operation.
Bush Jr. got us into multiple wars and unlike his father did not limit the scope of them. His father did get us into a war with Iraq but was smart enough to keep it limited in scope.
Also, under Obama, the "wars" were not real wars like the Russia/Ukraine war where both sides are losing hundreds of people every week. But they were more like peacekeeping operations that occasionally ran into skirmishes.
> like the Russia/Ukraine war where both sides are losing hundreds of people every week.
Every week? If we just look at the Russian casualties numbers, its around 1000+ casualties PER DAY.
There was a recent leak of the death toll and the most active area's had a 2/5 dead rate, 1/3 "missing" rate, and the rest was wounded.
If we only count the death + "missing" over the entire front for Russia, its 500+ PER DAY.
Ironically, the Russian->Afghanistan invasion was WAY less deadly then what we see today in Ukraine.
Your point still stands about the US evolvement in Iran/Afghanistan, but darn your numbers really way below the actual body count in the Russian "3-day limited special military operation". Those are numbers from the first year, not the daily of the third year.
> Every week? If we just look at the Russian casualties numbers, its around 1000+ casualties PER DAY.
You are likely correct. I have heard of the high casualty estimates, but wanted to keep it conservative to not have someone complain about the estimate being too high.
Peacekeeping is like the UN sending troops in to monitor a ceasefire. These were wars. 35,000+ civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Overthrowing Gaddafi. Tens of thousands of airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Drone strikes killing thousands of civilians in Pakistan. US foreign policy has equated “peace” and “stability” with its own military hegemony, being almost constantly at war to further its hypocritical ideology. It’s been a cash cow for the defense lobby.
Fun fact, the 2 longest periods of peace in history are called the Pax Romana and Pax Mongolica. The Mongolians and the Romans are known for fighting wars, lots and lots of wars. The only prolonged periods of peace in history are when one country or empire gets much stronger than the rest.
Another fun fact, the lowest per capita worldwide war deaths in a specific year in world history occurred in 2019.
And finally, when the US goes isolationist, the rest of you animals start killing each other instantly. So keep it up if you want a lot more "history" to happen in your lifetime.
Both the Pax Romana and Pax Mongolica saw their share of violence - plausibly comparable to 19th century Europe, or the Han and Tang dynasties, which which were not unipolar. We just don’t have good numbers for any of these cases. The long-history basis of your argument is flimsy at best.
The US itself only began resuming mass offensives with the decline of the USSR. But a world collapsing into unipolarity should lead to less conflict according to your view, as there would be less incentive for inter-state violence. The other pole was undergoing collapse, and the US sent soldiers, and continued to do so for decades.
But strictly speaking 2019 is part of a longer term downtrend in violence between nations after World War 2. That’s a trend that preceded American hegemony - a hegemony which is frankly a shadow of its former self. The real risk today isn’t multipolarity, it’s that the US is denial of multipolarity. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel. The US just doesn’t have the money to hemorrhage out to military disasters any more. It’s a house of cards growing taller and taller. What has no limit is the foolish arrogance of our leaders. The way to stop war is rarely escalation (anathema to the defense lobby).
And we are all human beings, US and non-US alike, not animals. It’s the capacity for compassion that makes us human, not the ability to kill.
If you ask me, Putin is welcome to end the Ukraine war at any time he wants! Getting out of a war is actually easy if you don't care what happens after that, e.g. in the case of Afghanistan accept as "sunk costs" the billions of dollars and thousands of lives that were lost during the 20 years that NATO was involved there.
Reminds me of OpenAI being the most closed AI company out there.
Not even talking about them having "safe" and "Israel" in the same sentence, how antonymic.
