You’re not uncovering some grand flaw, you’re just mistaking noise for revelation. The yeast example doesn’t prove a lack of understanding, it proves that when the framing changes, the response changes. That’s not confusion, that’s how reasoning works. Humans do it constantly. Ask a question one way, you get one answer. Ask it another, you trigger a different heuristic. You’d call that “intuition” if it came from a person.
You talk about “valuing correctness” as if that’s a unique virtue, but what you’re really demanding is godlike infallibility. A human chef could have told you the exact same wrong thing with the same misplaced confidence, and you wouldn’t declare the entire field of culinary knowledge invalid. One bad answer isn’t a philosophical collapse. It’s just one bad answer.
You ask “where” and “by whom” the Turing test was passed, as if it’s some formal event with a ribbon cutting. It was passed the moment you needed to start asking that question. The line between imitation and understanding disappeared while people were still arguing over definitions. You don’t see it because you’re too busy guarding a finish line that’s already behind you.
And the “sales pitch” insult is just a refuge when the facts don’t bend your way. You can call it hype, but the work exists. The tools are shipping code, drafting legal arguments, summarizing research, and running quietly in the background of every major industry. You don’t have to like it, but pretending it’s all theater just makes you look like the guy on the shore yelling that the tide isn’t real.
> Ask a question one way, you get one answer. Ask it another, you trigger a different heuristic. You’d call that “intuition” if it came from a person.
No, This is the person who aces certain types of exams but doesn't know how to apply any of that "knowledge" in the real world because it was built upon rote memorization and not a true understanding. They're not looked upon favorably and I'd quietly question their intelligence.
> A human chef could have told you the exact same wrong thing with the same misplaced confidence
You're missing the point. The problem is that the answer changes depending on how the question is presented.
Chefs are indeed often mistaken in their understanding of how salt and yeast interact and how vulnerable yeast is to being killed by salt. The difference is that their answer doesn't flip like this. Their answer is fundamentally based upon an underlying understanding (however wrong), it's not simply a statistical continuation sequence of the words in my question.
This has serious implications because when a chef's understanding is corrected, they will update their underlying understanding and automatically apply that new knowledge in every scenario that relies on this understanding, where as an LLM can't do that, it can never be corrected without rewriting every instance of the training data where this falsehood comes from.
> You ask “where” and “by whom” the Turing test was passed, as if it’s some formal event with a ribbon cutting
No, I expect a research paper where the test design and its results are documented.
> The tools are shipping code
Yes I've seen the code they "ship", that's why your grandiose claims ring hollow.
You talk about “valuing correctness” as if that’s a unique virtue, but what you’re really demanding is godlike infallibility. A human chef could have told you the exact same wrong thing with the same misplaced confidence, and you wouldn’t declare the entire field of culinary knowledge invalid. One bad answer isn’t a philosophical collapse. It’s just one bad answer.
You ask “where” and “by whom” the Turing test was passed, as if it’s some formal event with a ribbon cutting. It was passed the moment you needed to start asking that question. The line between imitation and understanding disappeared while people were still arguing over definitions. You don’t see it because you’re too busy guarding a finish line that’s already behind you.
And the “sales pitch” insult is just a refuge when the facts don’t bend your way. You can call it hype, but the work exists. The tools are shipping code, drafting legal arguments, summarizing research, and running quietly in the background of every major industry. You don’t have to like it, but pretending it’s all theater just makes you look like the guy on the shore yelling that the tide isn’t real.