About whether next-token prediction gives LLMs real mathematical reasoning.
Has this happened?
Yes 92 (71%)Not sure 28 (22%)No 10 (8%)
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 next-token prediction gives LLMs real mathematical reasoning.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
And LLMs will never be able to reason about mathematical objects and proofs. You cannot learn the truth of a statement by reading more tokens.
A system that can will probably adopt a different acronym (and gosh that will be an exciting development... I look forward to the day when we can dispatch trivial proofs to be formalized by a machine learning algorithm so that we can focus on the interesting parts while still having the entire proof formalized).