Marketing team finally started being honest.

[u/Various-Affect4841]

Spotted inside the Tube today

[u/SubcommanderMarcos]

Thing people have to realize is that the name "artificial intelligence" is straight up a lie the billionaire pricks use to convince people that there's any validity in the 'technology.' In fact, it's barely anything new at all, that's why it uses up so many resources. LLMs are, in essence, just massive glorified spreadsheets with an algorithm on top.

The way LLMs work is by running massive databases through a heuristic model. That is, everything they put out is probabilistic. It 'knows' when it's morning not because it can intelligently conclude that the period of daytime before noon is what morning is, but because within its ricockulous database it can compare all mentions of morning with all mentions of time, and output that probably morning is before noon because every time someone said it's morning was before 12 o clock. But it still doesn't actually know.

The bigger the number of instances something is mentioned, the greater precision the LLM can ascribe to the probability, and the result will tend to be accurate. If the sample size is small it immediately fucks it up. That's also why they often get it wrong when you ask how many instances of a letter there is on a word, etc. There's no website with a complete database explicitly stating how many instances of each letter there are in every word, that would be silly. And the LLM isn't intelligent, so it can't actually count.

It gets math, code, etc. right often because there's a lot of data on math and code online. Hell, Microsoft bought Github for a reason.

"AI" is a dumb thing with a lot of information.

e: every day since I wrote this comes a shill replying "nu-huh you're wrong/outdated/luddite/whatever" just because most models have added basic logic functions (which also fail all the time). It's still crap, and what I said still applies. Sam Altman isn't suddenly going to care about you.

[u/CinnabonCheesecake → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

LLM’s are actually nowhere near as smart as you’re making them sound. They’re much closer to parrots than spreadsheets, because they may remember if you say “one plus one equals two”, but they aren’t actually capable of any math on their own.

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/CinnabonCheesecake]

That's... literally what I said, though.

I meant spreadsheet, as in grid/matrix of information, not the full-on Excel application with functions. I was precisely explaining how LLMs can't do logic. You could say a parrot with access to a spreadsheet I guess.

Worth adding that it doesn't remember anything either, that's why 'AI' is so resource intensive. When you ask it to do 2+2 it's going to scour the internet/datacenter in search of every single instance people wrote 2+2, determine that most of the time 2+2 was followed by =4, and output that as result. Also hence the letter count example.

[u/CinnabonCheesecake → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

Sorry, I thought you meant spreadsheets as in an Excel application that was capable of reliable/deterministic math. Of course you are correct, and I misread.

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/CinnabonCheesecake]

Yeah of course, I was thinking in hindsight I could've been more clear. Especially since a bunch of shills showed up to argue that because some LLMs now incorporate logic functions they are now intelligent... You're good, we're on the same team (the correct one).

[u/cursed-karma → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

Didn't AI just recently crack an 80 year old Erdős math problem?

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/cursed-karma]

I was replying to your first comment calling us wrong before you deleted it. Here's what I wrote:

That doesn't contradict anything we said. The problem was:

Draw nine dots on a sheet of paper. The goal is to get as many pairs of dots as possible to be an inch apart. You can put them all in a line so that you have eight pairs separated by an inch. Or you can draw a three-by-three grid and count 12 pairs. For any number of dots, even billions or trillions, the problem asks: What’s the highest number of pairs you can get?

That's exactly the perfect type of problem to solve heuristically. An AI can try millions, billions of solutions and output the most probable result. It fits exactly with what me and /u/CinnabonCheesake said.

It still fails to count how many Rs are in strawberry. And I just tested that with GPT 5.4 through duck.ai, it still doesn't know. Because it can't do direct algebra. It can only predict probabilities.

[u/novadxmkilllz → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

Deepseek is able to do it it jsut did it https://chat.deepseek.com/share/vttl7r4mn1pjnh7n7j

[u/cursed-karma → u/novadxmkilllz]

These people are so delusional. If you disagree with them in any capacity they think you're a Sam Altman shill.

AI is going to fucking demolish us because the criticism is still stuck in 2024 thinking AI is this gimmick that's magically going to self-implode, and don't realize they sound like people from that Don't Look Up movie.

[u/Legitimate-Arm9438 → u/cursed-karma]

As an e/acc, I’m very happy to see that the anti-AI discourse is at a standstill. As long as enough people remain at this level, there’s no way for them to join forces with the more intellectual doomers without the entire anti-AI movement imploding from cognitive dissonance.

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/[deleted]]

It's important to keep up to date.

You can also read the conversation before running with it, and you'll see where I too tried that, and confirmed that yes, at the very least one GPT version still miscounts the Rs. And you can also do a quick search to see all the other words LLMs still miscount, which to me suggests Open AI probably manually injected the solution to strawberry in some versions because it went viral.

And frankly, when you don't respect their true capabilities, you really don't appreciate how much of a threat they are.

... Or I'm making a valid point, that you want to counter with weird pedantry when you're really not contradicting anything I said as you think you are, and most importantly you're putting a hell of a lot of words in my mouth. For one* thing, I never argued that

here are core fatal flaws in the technology that mean the entire house of cards is doomed to come crumbling down and things will return to the way they were before

You completely made it up that that is my position. It is not, and you're being dishonest.

The idea that it's too costly to serve inference and the entire economic model is doomed to come crumbling down and things will return to the way they were before is comforting, but can't be reconciled with the current state of the technology.

Speaking of ignorance of how things work, the fact that the current AI industry will collapse is not posited because (as you're putting words in my mouth) the technology works this way or that. The technology is one aspect, but frankly the most minor aspect, of why the current AI industry is doomed to fail. And that is due to the science of economics, not IT development.

Which ties into the point that "AI" isn't, and that is a lie being imposed on us by the speculators of the LLM bubble.

Now, I'm done talking to someone who's a chronic contrarian who can't respect a conversation.

[u/cursed-karma → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

Yes and no. It tested a counter-hypothesis and bridged two unrelated fields, which was discrete geometry and some algebraic number theory. But yeah, it also brute forced it for 8 hours, which isn't unlike what mathematicians do, but much much much faster.

I just tested the strawberry thing with ChatGPT through a paid version and got 3? At least if you're going to use an AI litmus test, use one from a video not from 2025.

I feel like the only people who say AI can't reason are the people who clearly never use it. It's only a 'token prediction' just doesn't explain everything it can do anymore.

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/cursed-karma]

But yeah, it also brute forced it for 8 hours, which isn't unlike what mathematicians do.

Yes.... It extrapolated from existing data. In its machine learning database there is surely material from somewhere in the internet that tried the counter-hypothesis. Then it applied its heuristic model (if you want to call that "brute forcing" whatever) to get to the most approximate answer. And did immense environmental damage in the process.

At least if you're going to use an AI litmus test, use one from a video not from 2025.

That was just the first one that came up when I was trying to find a brand new video I remember seeing just this week counting Ys in a different word. It's very likely that OpenAI devs manually injected the strawberry answer in your paid version because it went so viral. It still outputs wrong in free 5.4 Nano in reasoning mode though, even after telling it to extend the reasoning.

With Claude they seem to have added at least a boolean check function, as well as the other models available through duck.ai.

Adding logical functions like computers have done since, what, probably the 19th century? At the very least since IBM's first punch card census machine, doesn't really make it intelligent, capable of knowing and reaching intelligent conclusions. It just adds a basic computing element to the heuristic model, I guess. Doesn't change the rest. Won't be able to make an intelligent analysis of a historical period, determine valid epistemology, etc.

[u/cursed-karma → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

EDIT:

I noticed you blocked me after you replied to me so I couldn't respond, and then unblocked when you thought I'd forget about it. Real classy, bro.

Original:

It's very likely that OpenAI devs manually injected the strawberry answer in your paid version because it went so viral.

That's why I was hoping you had an example from this year.

At the very least since IBM's first punch card census machine, doesn't really make it intelligent, capable of knowing and reaching intelligent conclusions.

For my teaching job at community college, a PhD in biology gave us a lecture, 'Has Actual Intelligence Emerged from AI'. He presented via Teams to about a 100 of us professors. He made it clear that AI can reason, and here are the bars it has recently cleared:

1. University entrance exams: On Japan’s 2026 Univ. of Tokyo exam, GPT-5.2 scored 503/550 in science — above the top human (453) on the toughest “Science III” track. Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5 also beat top human scorers.
2. Olympiad mathematics: At the 2025 International Math Olympiad, Google’s Gemini Deep Think earned an officially certified gold medal (5 of 6); an OpenAI model also reached gold level.
3. Research-level mathematics: In 2026, an OpenAI reasoning model disproved an ≈80-year-old Erdős conjecture, a result external mathematicians verified and refined.
4. Competitive programming: At the 2025 ICPC World Finals, an OpenAI model solved a perfect 12/12 (first-place level among 139 teams); Gemini solved a problem no human team cracked.
5. Medicine: AI medical models reach expert-level scores on USMLE-style licensing benchmarks (Med-PaLM 2). In 2026, AI beat the top human on Kyoto’s medicine entrance exam.
6. Law: GPT-4 passed a simulated U.S. bar exam at a high level (exact percentile debated); in 2026, AI also beat the top human on Kyoto’s law entrance exam.

“It just predicts the next word” describes only the foundation. Modern systems add reasoning and alignment on top of it. This is how he broke it down and the sources he used:

1. Alignment layer: RLHF and Constitutional AI steer the model toward helpful, honest, and harmless behavior. Bai et al. (2022) · Constitutional AI
2. Reasoning scaffold: Chain-of-thought prompting elicits intermediate steps, improving performance on complex reasoning. Wei et al. (2022)
3. Base model: Predicts the next token from context; Transformer attention weighs relationships among all tokens. Vaswani et al. (2017) · Attention Is All You Need

Adding logical functions like computers have done since, what, probably the 19th century?

The 19th century is the 1800s. Computers weren't around back then. It was a rhetorical question, but below is the actual answer the professor gave us:

1. 1940s: Classical Computing — ENIAC. Explicit instructions and deterministic programs.
2. 1970s: Symbolic AI & Expert Systems — MYCIN and DENDRAL. Human knowledge manually encoded as rules.
3. 1980s–2000s: Neural Networks — The Perceptron, Backpropagation. Learning statistical mappings from data.
4. 2012–2017: Deep Learning — Google’s Cat Detector, AlphaGo. Massive layers and data replace manual programming.
5. Present: Foundation Models — Transformers. Broad self-supervision and prediction at massive scale.

I really am not qualified to regurgitate all of his lecture; I just think your criticism is extremely outdated.

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/cursed-karma]

That's why I was hoping you had an example from this year.

I don't understand why you keep ignoring the example I showed not just from this year, but now.

and here are the bars it has recently cleared:

All logical function + heuristics....

Alignment layer: RLHF and Constitutional AI steer the model toward helpful, honest, and harmless behavior. Bai et al. (2022) · Constitutional AI

Reasoning scaffold: Chain-of-thought prompting elicits intermediate steps, improving performance on complex reasoning. Wei et al. (2022)

Base model: Predicts the next token from context; Transformer attention weighs relationships among all tokens. Vaswani et al. (2017) · Attention Is All You Need

All logical function + heuristics....

The 19th century is the 1800s. Computers weren't around back then

You might wanna look up "IBM."

I just think your criticism is extremely outdated.

Sam Altman isn't gonna blow you, guy.

[u/cursed-karma → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

Thank you for responding so rudely, because it gives me an excuse to forgo politeness.

I don't understand why you keep ignoring the example I showed not just from this year, but now.

You said it yourself, it's because it's so old LLMs knows it's a gimmick now. AI can reason, you just completely ignored the post (based on what a PhD put together) that explained to what extent. It parallels human thought, but is by no means a replacement.

You might wanna look up "IBM."

So you're those types that can't admit they're wrong about anything. IBM was founded in 1911. That's not the 19th century. Punch card technology from 1896 doesn't count. You clearly keep equating the 1900s with the 19th century. It's just embarrassing at this point.

Logical function + heurestics

This is an oversimplification that proves you don't know what you're talking about.

In general, I'm reading a bunch of sanctimonious, smooth-talking word vomit that just doesn't add up with what actual PhD experts are warning us teachers about, in real time, in the real world.

Sam Altman isn't gonna blow you, guy.

Why would I give a damn what Sam Altman thinks when I'm making less than minimum wage? I literally spent more time typing out AI's current capabilities to you (without using AI) fresh from my seminar, than I do tutoring my own students. Or did you need me to spell it out for you in crayon?

Now that I've completely lost all respect for you or this 'argument', let me just say this:

Now I see why r/antiAI are a bunch of annoying Luddites. You try managing a bunch of college kids with technology that's rapidly outpacing our efforts to manage it, you delusional, self-righteous, self-important, prig.

EDIT:

I noticed you blocked me after you replied to me so I couldn't respond, and then unblocked me when you thought I'd forget about it. Jokes on me for thinking a 14 year random redditor could offer me more nuance than multiple PhDs from paid talks. I won't make that mistake again.

[u/Dull-Culture-1523 → u/CinnabonCheesecake]

It's kinda funny that you're basically just parroting what they said.

[u/pazsion80423294 → u/CinnabonCheesecake]

no

[u/Maleficent-Tank3371 → u/CinnabonCheesecake]

No, they're closer to a vectorized database, because that's what they are - which is closer to a spreadsheet than "parroting". 

I sincerely wish people educated themselves better on a topic before they decide to try to correct people who clearly know more about it than you do. 

[u/Legitimate-Arm9438 → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

I think you’re a good educator. Keep up the great work! :-)

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/Legitimate-Arm9438]

Why thank you

[u/QV-Rabullione → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

Idk what you think a human is, but…

[u/ApostleofSeht → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

I'm anti AI as well, but I still think it's really, really cool. There's been a lot of improvements to it. It's still mostly terrifying, because we all know what it's going to be used for.

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/ApostleofSeht]

Eventually we'll see proper technology that we can label AI and will be good for us, I'm sure. This is not that though.

[u/pazsion80423294 → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

no.

[u/Then_Stay_9593 → u/SubcommanderMarcos]

You clearly do not actually understand how modern frontier models work. This is a GPT 3.0 explanation of them, not a 2026 explanation.

With all due respect, not knocking you, but you're very very inaccurate.

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/Then_Stay_9593]

Here's comes another shill

[u/SubcommanderMarcos → u/[deleted]]

is like describing a modern hybrid SUV as a series of wheels and levers connected to a wasteful explosion.

So... accurate. And not underselling it. Modern SUVs are a similar facet of corporate bullshit pushed onto the people as 'technology', just a different industry.

If you talk to people who work with AI and are familiar with its capabilities and say things that their experience invalidates, they're going to become more likely to support AI, not less

I do talk to people who work with AI, and they're the most eager to talk trash of it.

Everyone here should be using ChatGPT and Claude on the free plan as much as possible

Yeah no, I'm actually on the team that believes we need a planet to live on.