Technology

Because they’re fucking terrible at designing tools to solve problems, they are obviously less and less good at pretending this is an omnitool that can do everything with perfect coherency (and if it isn’t working right it’s because you’re not believing or paying hard enough)

why don't they program them

AI models aren't programmed traditionally. They're generated by machine learning. Essentially the model is given test prompts and then given a rating on its answer. The model's calculations will be adjusted so that its answer to the test prompt will be closer to the expected answer. You repeat this a few billion times with a few billion prompts and you will have generated a model that scores very high on all test prompts.

Then someone asks it how many R's are in strawberry and it gets the wrong answer. The only way to fix this is to add that as a test prompt and redo the machine learning process which takes an enormous amount of time and computational power each time it's done, only for people to once again quickly find some kind of prompt it doesn't answer well.

There are already AI models that play chess incredibly well. Using machine learning to solve a complexe problem isn't the issue. It's trying to get one model to be good at absolutely everything.

...or a simple counter to count the r in strawberry. Because that's more difficult than one might think and they are starting to do this now.

Because the LLMs are now being used to vibe code themselves.

They are starting to do this. Most new models support function calling and can generate code to come up with math answers etc

If you pay for chatgpt you can connect it with wolfrenalpha and it's relays the maths to it

I think they're trying to do that. But AI can still fail at that lol

This is where MCP comes in. It's a protocol for LLMs to call standard tools. Basically the LLM would figure out the tool to use from the context, then figure out the order of parameters from those the MCP server says is available, send the JSON, and parse the response.

why don't they program them to look up math programs and outsource chess to other programs when they're asked for that stuff?

Because the AI doesn't know what it's being asked, it's just a algorithm guessing what the next word in a reply is. It has no understanding of what the words mean.

"Why doesn't the man in the Chinese room just use a calculator for math questions?"

What the tech is being marketed as and what it’s capable of are not the same, and likely never will be. In fact all things are very rarely marketed how they truly behave, intentionally.

Everyone is still trying to figure out what these Large Reasoning Models and Large Language Models are even capable of; Apple, one of the largest companies in the world just released a white paper this past week describing the “illusion of reasoning”. If it takes a scientific paper to understand what these models are and are not capable of, I assure you they’ll be selling snake oil for years after we fully understand every nuance of their capabilities.

TL;DR Rich folks want them to be everything, so they’ll be sold as capable of everything until we repeatedly refute they are able to do so.

Marketing does not mean functionality. AI is absolutely being sold to the public and enterprises as something that can solve everything. Obviously it can't, but it's being sold that way. I would bet the average person would be surprised by this headline solely on what they've heard about the capabilities of AI.

Really then why are they cramming AI into every app and every device and replacing jobs with it and claiming they’re saving so much time and money and they’re the best now the hardest working most efficient company and this is the future and they have a director of AI vision that’s right a director of AI vision a true visionary to lead us into the promised land where we will make money automatically please bro just let this be the automatic money cheat oh god I’m about to

Plot twist: the toddler has a multi-year marketing push worth tens if not hundreds of millions, which convinced a lot of people who don't know the first thing about chess that it really is very impressive, and all those chess-types are just jealous.

I'm guessing it's not even hard to get it to "confidently" violate the rules.

Okay I maybe exaggerated a bit, but a lot of people think it actually knows things, or is actually smart. Which… it’s not… at all. It’s just pattern recognition. Which was I assume the point of showing it can’t even beat the goddamn Atari because it cannot think or reason, it’s all just copy pasta and pattern recognition.