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Comment by pingou | Hacker News Reader

It took the author until Sept. 8, 2026, to realize LLMs are not just stochastic parrots? I'm glad they did, but I'm not sure that is worthy of the front page.

"I remember early systems struggling with something as simple as 2+2. Then, within just a few years, we went from that to systems achieving IMO gold-medal-level performance and now, assuming this proof is correct, to a Millennium Prize problem. That completely changes how I think about the trajectory".

How would Sept. 8 completely change how they think about the trajectory? Seems like there has been tremendous progress at all time.

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It isn't hard to conceive of things that plateau so perhaps OP thought that the 'intelligence' underlying these models would reach some mark and then level off. If instead they just keep getting smarter/better, that can really impact the highest potential use that people can imagine for them.

They still are parrots. Just properly trained with a lot of data. Doesn’t make them not useful. But that’s what they are though.

I interpret the word 'parrot' to mean incapable of creative or original thought. Solving a major maths problem that has resisted the best mathematicians for so long seems to prove otherwise (even if it were just a matter of remixing old ideas, which is not the case here).

What do they need to do for you to consider them non parrots, and do you consider a lot of humans as parrots?

> Solving a major maths problem that has resisted the best mathematicians for so long seems to prove otherwise (even if it were just a matter of remixing old ideas, which is not the case here).

I don't think we know enough about how they work to claim that. OpenAI said they had 10 THOUSANDS agents working on the problem, testing all ideas they found in the literature (including, it seems, the breakthrough of the guys who had it for the hypo viscose case).

Yup. They have much more bandwidth to test things, but no original thoughts (and tbh, not thoughts at all, actually).

>creative or original thought.

If this can only answer questions, then it fails this test. Because at least the question has to come from somewhere...

Did it create the path to the solution, or just grab it from conversations with a researcher working on the problem?

Good question. I think we will know very soon, perhaps not for this particular math problem, but they just need to solve another one independently and we'll know for sure. My bet is that they can.

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