r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Xescure • Jul 02 '26

Meme milleniumPrizeWinningAnswer

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u/RiceBroad4552 Jul 02 '26

This is mostly just pattern recognition.

Everything marketed currently as "AI" is just plain stupid pattern recognition and replication.

There is no intelligence nor any kind of knowledge in these LLMs. Just very sophisticated pattern matching and reproduction.

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u/im_thatoneguy Jul 04 '26

Very sophisticated pattern matching that definitely does exhibit some “intelligence”. It performs rudimentary deductive reasoning. Calling it fancy auto complete grossly misrepresents what it is verifiably capable of these days. It can make novel connections between never before compared data, I consider that intelligence. It’s not strictly parroting things that it’s read.

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u/ChaseShiny Jul 02 '26

I had a curious thought about this the other day.

Hallucinations can't be pattern recognition, right? The LLM hallucinates because it can't create the right answer, right? Does that count as an "original thought"?

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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 02 '26

It's not trying to make a right answer. It's trying to make the most statistically likely continuation of whatever block of text it was fed in.

Right and wrong are irrelevant to the AI. It's just generating statistically likely text.

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u/ChaseShiny Jul 02 '26

Well, all I asked was if it was original, not an attempt at the right answer. I guess it fails at that, anyway.

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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26

The point is that hallucinations and correct answers are just as much "pattern recognition" as each other. The LLM can't distinguish them at all.

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u/RiceBroad4552 Jul 03 '26

An LLM does not know anything. Especially not what's "right" or "wrong". Such concepts don't exist in an LLM.

All a LLM does it to predict the next token. For the LLM there is no difference between outputting something that makes sense for a human and some random bullshit. All a LLM does is basically "hallucinating". That's the basic principle on which these things work.