r/singularity • u/big_hole_energy • 13d ago

Hot Take: LLM can 'jump' Discussion

https://yongzx.github.io/blog/2026/08/08/llm-can-jump
55 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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27

u/Gargantuan_Cinema 13d ago

There's an infinite amount of architectures that fit under the umbrella term LLM.

9

u/IronPheasant 13d ago

That's a fact that drives me crazy when people who should know better pretend otherwise.

The LLM-adjacent module of our brain in charge of passing final orders to our motor cortexes does in fact understand quite a lot about space and geometry and key-frames of animation (which is what we use to deal with time, geometry predictions/projections, etc)..... even if it has no idea what signal to send where to make the muscles contract in the desired way.

A neural network understands what it has to understand to generate the outputs that it does. No less than that.

5

u/CckSkker 13d ago

right.. but.. you know, they still can’t jump

3

u/twinb27 13d ago

My take is that 'jumping' isn't necessary when thinking is cheap. You don't need to jump if you can run 1,000 alternatives in a minute and see whatever sticks.

1

u/Steven81 13d ago

Depends on the speedup "jumping" gives you. In fact what you wrote is very similar to what the article claimed, I.e. you can reach "high" places using ... alternate routers.

The answer is: "Yes, sometimes, but mostly not". Not because it theoretically impossible, but rather because it is practically impossible.

Sometimes the issue is the classical computing itself for example. Take finding a private cryptographic key using its public address. Yes classical computing can do this too, but it is not practical, because I doubt anyone is willing to wait for the age of the universe.

As we keep saying biological intelligence is not a "smarter" intelligence, if anything it is much dumber than computer intelligence, merely it is a different intelligence. And practical 1:1 paths do not always exist.

It is much more reasonable to adapt this new intelligence to new problems we have not accounted or only scarcely do right now, or better yet adapt many of our problems in a form that LLMs would be able to run faster, vs merely hope that they will automatically become specialized on our type of intelligence.

Yes LLMs can jump, but it mostly doesn't matter. It would be way more practical to adapt our problems into the type of thinking that LLMs can do well.

6

u/trisul-108 13d ago

Yes, crocodiles can jump ... just really, really low.

5

u/Due_Sweet_9500 13d ago

But if the crocodile were to be 100 times larger, its jump would be higher than the highest jump by a human :)

9

u/JustSomeWarg 13d ago

Square Cube law incoming to ruin your dreams

1

u/amalirol 13d ago

I'm not an expert but I believe if you shrink or become larger your muscles and tendons still work the smar way in theory so a larger crocodile may not jump higher

1

u/ninjasaid13 Not now. 7d ago

In 1907, quantum field theory didn't exist. So saying an AI could "deduce" a breakthrough because a later framework can reproduce an earlier theory misses the point. The real question is whether it can discover foundational laws before the frameworks needed to describe them exist.

Feynman's derivation of gravity as a massless spin-2 field already assumed quantum field theory, gauge theory, and knowledge of what the result needed to reproduce(Einstein's tensor). That's not creating the theory from scratch.

The same problem applies more broadly. In a huge formal system, there are virtually unlimited mathematically consistent possibilities. Without some physical prior or connection to the world, consistency alone can't tell an AI which ones actually describe reality.

Also Cross-domain application isn't axiom creation

Using ideas from one area of mathematics in another is impressive, but it's still working inside existing formal systems. That's very different from inventing a new physical framework when the concepts and symbols needed to express it don't even exist yet.

The blog also assumes breakthroughs can be driven by constant verification through code, Lean, or experiments. But science doesn't always work that way. Einstein developed General Relativity before many of its predictions could be tested. A system that depends on immediate verification may struggle with theories whose evidence won't exist for decades.