About whether LLM mistakes reveal limits of their intelligence, like a child learning to spell.
Has this happened?
Yes 39 (30%)Not sure 30 (23%)No 59 (46%)
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 LLM mistakes reveal limits of their intelligence, like a child learning to spell.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Your explanation perfectly captures another big differences between human / mammal intelligence and LLM intelligence: A child can make mistakes and (few shot) learn. A LLM can’t.
And even a child struggling with spelling won’t make a mistake like the one I have described. It will spell things wrong and not even catch the spelling mistake. But it won’t pretend and insist there is a mistake where there isn’t (okay, maybe it will, but only to troll you).
Maybe talking about “real” intelligence was not precise enough and it’s better to talk about “mammal like intelligence.”
I guess there is a chance LLMs can be trained to a level where all the questions where there is a correct answer for (basically everything that can be benchmarked) will be answered correctly. Would this be incredibly useful and make a lot of jobs obsolete? Yes. Still a very different form of intelligence.