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Comment by tossandthrow | Hacker News Reader

> That sentiment makes me cringe. If you understand how LLMs work, you'd know

> But not in the "I'd love to learn more" kind

I hope you are able to see the problem in your own communication here.

Computation classes are interesting because they say something about fundamental capabilities.

Two machine that are Turing complete are in theory able to carry out the same computations. They are isomorph mediums of computation.

Regardless. Please keep it sober. If you think you know something, enlighten us. But don't just propagate out lies.

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The thing about discussing or explaining constraints, is that it rarely is useful or productive if the other side does not accept (or understand) the reality of them.

Turing completeness is not exactly a high bar, and it's genuinely confusing as to why you bring it up. Your C++ precompiler is exactly as intelligent as whatever is your favorite agentic workflow with whatever harness you're referring to. Both might be Turing complete. Neither are intelligent. But one of them seems to be fooling you to think otherwise.

There have been many times that the C++ precompiler produced some output I couldn't understand. I might even at some point thought it was trying to tell me something profound I was too dumb to comprehend. Turns out it was just a missing semicolon.

Yes, so there is not reason to believe that you can do computations that the precompiler can not do.

There is no reason to believe that that you can not fully simulate intelligence in a C++ precompiler.

The precompiler can be simulated by human intelligence, and human intelligence can simulate a c++ precompiler.

Again, you are the one who arrogantly say they llms can not be intelligent without supplying any argument for such.

> Again, you are the one who arrogantly say they llms can not be intelligent without supplying any argument for such.

Not really. You've provided the arguments yourself, just now. But, you don't understand them. Which, brings me back to the initial remark, as to why this engagement is bound to be unproductive. I'm off to bed. Have a good one.

I'll bite, I think Turing completeness is relevant in that it has to be used to informally argue via the Church-Turing thesis that biological intelligence cannot exceed the power or expressivity of formal neural network models. It thus is a good counterargument to stochastic parrot dismissals of neural net based AI such as LLMs, which really are still black boxes. The issue is not simply "So you think that humans are as powerful as LaTeX (or vice versa), ha ha how absurd!"

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