Sure, just keep moving the goalposts. It's not a "real AI" because it can't take over the US military command and kick off WW3 and finish the survivors off with killer robots yet!

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_doctor_love 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's how it works though. The moment we have "AI" and see something working, it immediately ceases to be magic because "it's just a program after all." Aligning on a true definition of Artificial Intelligence is a very vexing problem.

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jacobgold 2 days ago | parent [-]

We could've slapped a chat interface on calculators and called them "AI" because they can do superhuman math instantly. Most technical people would've thought that was stupid.

LLMs are the same kind of category mistake.

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CamperBob2 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Let's talk about category mistakes. You've been here since 2007, according to your other reply. You understand that calculators have as much to do with mathematics as telescopes have to do with cosmology. Right?

If someone unskilled at math brings a calculator to an international math competition, they will not succeed at solving many problems. Most likely, they will solve none at all. But if they bring a frontier LLM (and succeed at concealing it from the organizers), they can walk away with a gold medal. Such a feat requires intelligence... and if the contestant didn't provide the intelligence himself/herself, where'd it come from?

That means that analogies involving calculators are completely useless when the topic is AI. Calculators are not, and can never be, intelligent. LLMs are nothing even remotely like calculators.

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jacobgold 2 days ago | parent [-]

> If someone unskilled at math brings a calculator to an international math competition, they will not succeed at solving many problems.

> But if they bring a frontier LLM (and succeed at concealing it from the organizers), they can walk away with a gold medal.

Of course you could win all kinds of math competitions with a concealed calculator. Maybe you'd need a fancy one, like a little SBC running Python. Anything complex and timed would be easy to win. You'd look like a genius to anyone who didn't know you had it.

> Such a feat requires intelligence... and if the contestant didn't provide the intelligence himself/herself, where'd it come from?

From computer software running on computer hardware, just like a calculator.

Calculating trillions of digits of pi also requires intelligence far beyond human capacity.

Computers displaying intelligence doesn't imply human-like intelligence. This is the source of confusion.

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scarmig 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The idea that a calculator, or a calculator with Python, or even a calculator with a proof assistant (and every book ever written on math) would help a random person at e.g. IMO or Putnam is fairly revealing.

	▲	CamperBob2 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah, this is definitely one of those "Smile, nod, back away slowly, reach for doorknob" threads.
	▲	jacobgold 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The idea that anyone would think anyone else would think that is fairly revealing.
	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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CamperBob2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course you could win all kinds of math competitions with a concealed calculator. Maybe you'd need a fancy one, like a little SBC running Python.

My mistake.

	▲	jacobgold 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Taking issue with using a computer to power the calculator? If so, you should know that all modern calculators are computers under the hood. Everything I've written about calculators applies to computers doing any kind of traditional deterministic processing, without anything like LLMs.

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_doctor_love 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Funny enough, calculators went through this exact same thing when they came out. "If the calculator can do math for the students, will they still learn?"

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jacobgold 2 days ago | parent [-]

We didn't have confused people claiming calculators were human-like intelligences doing math.

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Jensson 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

We did have that, people thought computers would overtake humans very soon when computers got better than humans at such things. It happens every single time computers do a new thing that previously humans were better at. Then 10 years later people see, oh that is just calculations, of course computers are better at that.

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_doctor_love 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sorry I don't follow what argument you're making?

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pixl97 2 days ago | parent [-]

They seem to be making a religious argument at this point. They don't like that the AI is a very poorly defined term and they are mad as hell about it to the point of irrational forum posting.

	▲	jacobgold 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

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dofm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It can however select a girls school as a military target, and did.

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dredmorbius a day ago | parent | next [-]

AI seems to have been involved in the targeting process, so partial truth.

There may have been outdated information which incorrectly associated the prior use of the site "as either a factory or arms depot". See Wikipedia:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack#Analy...>

Citing "Iranian school was on U.S. target list, may have been mistaken as military site" (March 11, 2026) <https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/11/...>.

I'm not drawing conclusions one way or the other, but there do seem to have been multiple factors at play, and assigning full responsibility to use of AI seems suspect.

Which isn't the same as saying AI isn't at fault; e.g., an AI might challenge a dated assessment of a prospective target's role or status, as might a human-in-the-loop target assessment team and process.

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dTal a day ago | parent | prev [-]

...did it really, though?

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dofm a day ago | parent [-]

Yeah, it did. I don't think this is really in doubt.

Especially since the military refuse to confirm it had any human oversight, which after all would have been a routine thing to talk about before AI targeted things — which is why we have the phrases "fog of war", "human error", "unfortunate mistake", etc.

It will take a while to shake out — we won't know for sure for a decade, I suspect, but it seems very likely this will prove to be an AI error.

	▲	dTal a day ago \| parent [-]
		Looks more like standard decision-washing finger pointing to me. "AI did it" is both hypey and also conveniently distracts from an uglier reality: >Palantir Technologies [built] Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike. >The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...