this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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There's a difference between 'language' and 'intelligence' which is why so many people think that LLMs are intelligent despite not being so.
The thing is, you can't train an LLM on math textbooks and expect it to understand math, because it isn't reading or comprehending anything. AI doesn't know that 2+2=4 because it's doing math in the background, it understands that when presented with the string
2+2=, statistically, the next character should be4. It can construct a paragraph similar to a math textbook around that equation that can do a decent job of explaining the concept, but only through a statistical analysis of sentence structure and vocabulary choice.It's why LLMs are so downright awful at legal work.
If 'AI' was actually intelligent, you should be able to feed it a few series of textbooks and all the case law since the US was founded, and it should be able to talk about legal precedent. But LLMs constantly hallucinate when trying to cite cases, because the LLM doesn't actually understand the information it's trained on. It just builds a statistical database of what legal writing looks like, and tries to mimic it. Same for code.
People think they're 'intelligent' because they seem like they're talking to us, and we've equated 'ability to talk' with 'ability to understand'. And until now, that's been a safe thing to assume.