About whether language models truly understand things or only generate plausible text.
Has this happened?
Yes 4 (3%)Not sure 31 (27%)No 80 (70%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether language models truly understand things or only generate plausible text.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Imagine an LLM was trained on the internet before LLMs were invented. It knows everything in the world. Every programming concept, every philosophical and logical concept. It is an "expert" on the then-current state of the art in machine learning.
Would it be able to invent itself?
I'm not moving the goalposts here. Language models are extremely impressive. I think they will change the world. I fear they will displace many jobs.
Maybe some day they will be able to invent themselves. Maybe that will come sooner than we think. As it stands, they couldn't. This is the distinction that you say doesn't exist.