Position: LLMs Can't Jump

292 points · 194 comments on HN · read original →

Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.

LLMs lack the grounded sensory experience needed for creative leaps in science.

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What commenters are saying

Commenters debated whether LLMs can make intuitive leaps like humans. Some argued sensory grounding is essential for breakthroughs such as Einstein's relativity. Others countered that abstract fields like math require similar grounding. One user noted prior HN discussions on identical headlines. A proposal to train an LLM on pre-1980 text to see if it could bootstrap itself generated extensive back-and-forth, with objections about data leakage, model collapse, and the need for modern hardware.