

Helen Liu
143 posts

@Helentheauthor
Novelist | VC | Author of The Road Afar 《远道苍苍》









AI executives and researchers “readily admit that they have not yet released a model that writes well,” @jasminewsun writes. She speaks with AI experts about why LLMs are built in a way that is antagonistic to great writing: theatlantic.com/technology/202…

Here's the longer version of our Nature piece. Our argument is simple: statistical approximation is not the same thing as intelligence. Strong benchmark scores often say very little about how LLMs behave under novelty, uncertainty, or shifting goals. Even more importantly, similar behaviors can arise from fundamentally different processes. In another paper, we identified seven epistemological fault lines between humans and LLMs. For example, LLMs have no internal representation of what is true. They often generate confident contradictions, especially in longer interactions, because they do not track what is actually true. Another example. Yes, LLMs have solved some open mathematical problems, but these cases typically involve applying known methods to well-defined problems. LLMs cannot invent anything that is truly new and true at the same time, because they lack the epistemic machinery to determine what is true. None of this means LLMs are useless. Quite the opposite: they are extraordinarily useful. But we should be careful about what they are and what they are not. Producing plausible text is not the same as understanding. Statistical prediction is not the same as intelligence. So despite the hype from the usual suspects, AGI has not been achieved. * paper in the first reply Joint with @Walter4C and @GaryMarcus





Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is "part of normal business." The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with "high blast radius" caused by "Gen-AI assisted changes" for which "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." Translation to human language: we gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking? The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. AWS spent 13 hours recovering after its own AI coding tool, asked to make some changes, decided instead to delete and recreate the environment (the software equivalent of fixing a leaky tap by knocking down the wall). Amazon called that an "extremely limited event" (the affected tool served customers in mainland China).



