About whether LLMs that fail simple questions can help with real science.
Has this happened?
Yes 88 (65%)Not sure 15 (11%)No 33 (24%)
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 LLMs that fail simple questions can help with real science.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I'm not asking for someone to overfit to being able to properly answer the question of "What day is it today?" I'm giving an example of a simple question that all LLMs need to be able to answer correctly.
But like, people are on here saying that this will make scientific improvements, and until it can get past the basic stuff, it's not in the ballpark of anything more complicated. Right now, we're basically at the stage of 10 million monkeys on 10 million typewriters for 10 million hours. Like, maybe we'll get Shakespeare out of it, but are we willing to sort through all of the crap it will generate along the way, when it can't actually create a useful answer to simple questions?