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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

So you asked an LLM to translate. It excells in translation. But ask it to solve and it will, inevitably, fail. But that's also expected.

The interesting question is: Given a C compiler and the problem, could an LLM come up with something like Prolog on its own?

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I think it could even solve, these kinds of riddles are heavily trained

Then what about new, unseen riddles that don't have a similar pattern to existing ones? That's the question people are asking.

If an LLM can solve a riddle of arbitrary complexity that is not similar to an already-solved riddle, have the LLM solve the riddle "how can this trained machine-learning model be adjusted to improve its riddle-solving abilities without regressing in any other meaningful capability".

It's apparent that particular riddle is not presently solved successfully by LLMs, as if it were solved, humans would be having LLMs improve themselves in the wild.

So, constructively, there exists at least one riddle that doesn't have a pattern similar to existing ones, where that riddle is unsolvable by any existing LLM.

If you present a SINGLE riddle an LLM can solve, people will reply that particular riddle isn't good enough. In order to succeed they need to solve all the riddles, including the one I presented above.

Unfortunately, that's a "could an omipotent god create a boulder so heavy he can't move it" level of "logic puzzle" and does your argument no favors.

It's quite the opposite. Converting to words like yours, the argument is "could a powerful but not omnipotent god make themself more powerful", and the answer is "probably".

If the god cannot grant themself powers they're not very powerful at all, are they?

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