I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or self study, and being able to apply it to the problem at hand.

I don't think I've had a truly original idea in my life. Combine A + B, when it's rare for people to know A and B at the same time. So from that perspective, what LLMs are doing is basically the same thing. Sometimes I am faster than the LLM because my context might be better organized, but it typically needs just a hint from me to steer itself correctly. It claims something is a memory leak, but smelling a rat, I suggest it to double check the garbage collection statistics too, at which point it's clear it's no leak, but a tuning error, at which point the LLM is better at tuning than me, because it has more energy than I do.

Maybe there's true brilliance out there, when something doesn't come out of combining data and building hypothesis until you get really lucky. My experience is not comprehensive. But I look around me, and it sure seems I've not been lucky enough to see it. Even the shiniest people I've worked with, which most of the audience here would recognize, have never shown me that they can go past this.

There is also an element of how you process information. Some people jump to instantly refute an idea with a counter example. Some people jump to statistical likelihood. There’s elements of trust vs trust but verify.

Some people, through practice and experience are better than others at breaking down foreign information and making sense of it, or jumping to an assumption.

I also think there’s an element of just remembering what my final conclusion was on an opinion, vs all my old opinions and all the work to get there. It’s easier to just store current belief and re-work-it out how I got there later.

People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!

There is an ability to hold ideas in the mind simultaneously. Some can hold a great deal more than others. It can be exercised, but is definitely bound by genetics.

If you want an example of someone at the near peak of human ability, check out Jon Von Neumann.

Then there is an ability to peer deeply into complex problems and somehow find the simplest truths that make sense of it all. Think of Einstein.

Both are incredibly intelligent, but in different ways. I'd say Von Neumann's memory was far greater than Einstein's though.

One can flawlessly ponder anything known to man, and the other could ponder completely original ideas (to an extent)

In line with the other comment on this post: I also am classified as “brilliant” by people and IQ tests. My country gave me an award for being a great inventor. But my memory is worse than anyone I know.

I can’t remember the lyrics to any songs, or the lines from any movies, or what I’m doing this week. I don’t think it’s a strong hypothesis.

My wife has a nearly eidetic memory, so marrying her was a game changer for counteracting mine :)

> out-remembering people around us.

Doing an angular -> react refactor with Opus 5 at work.

Amazed at how good it is but also amazed at how dumb it is after I told it I want a very basic and specific code review:do the file names match the contents? is one functionality/concern split in multiple files? do the variable names match what they do? does a method read nicely?

Anyway, I was very surprised at how bad it can be at this.

I suspect it's because the LLM simply does not focus well enough on a single method.

My gut modelling is that the critical files are quite small, some 4k LOC and the LLM tries to read them all in one go and my requirement is surprisingly difficult but the LLM does not realize it, loads all the input into context and simply cannot find a good signal per token/group of tokens.

I guess I can do it because I literally cannot fit 4k LOC in my head and I actually read only tens of lines but I can reeealy dig deep in those lines.

The LLM can remember lots, it has 1M context window, was trained with needle in the haystack problems, but it can severely underestimate how much computation is required with TASTE/universal computation type tasks.

Yes, LLMs are incredible when it comes to delivering well defined outcomes, it's evident they were RL trained very well. But they are incredibly bad at understanding nuance in a text.

It's incredible how agentic coding benchmaxing seems to correlate with writing good poetry but at the same time finding good names for files and variables and wiring beautiful code does not.

Same with getting basic details of who said what in an "adversarial" conversation between 2 humans -- LLMs are incredibly bad at it, with all their "almost discovering new maths" skills

Since it is so much easier to test for memory than understanding society grew to confuse the two. Only now faced with these other entities are people beginning to question it.

I know people that got to post grad math without understanding a thing but they could remember a lot easily, while many of those that understood but had a harder time remembering every last variation of everything got penalized.

Memory is one aspect of intelligence, but hardly the only one. Making new connections, logical deduction, spatial intelligence and creativity are also aspects.

I have fairly poor memory, but I can solve problems that people with better memory can't.

> I don't think I've had a truly original idea in my life.

There’s no such thing as a truly original idea. It is all just combining A+B!

Human can have periods of heightened mental capacity. Sometimes I looked back at some of my work days or weeks later and amazed how I could have done it. When you're in the flow, have enough sleep, and have long period of non-interrupted time, you can do amazing work.

Agreed “remembering” stuff is critical in most life’s situations where if you did, you will appeared to be smart. This is probably why spaced repetition has been a key element in learning for the past few decades.

But “remembering” is only the beginning (you have to remember first!), after that, elements like understanding relations, connecting dots and remixing, timing, etc will truly make one shine.

In one way, it’s like the current “LLM + Harness” setup for agents. LLM is how well it remembers, but different harness techniques really matters, at times even a worse model mixed with great harness can outperform great model with bad harness

I like to use the analogy that the human brain (when it comes to intelligence) is like a computer. We have storage, which is just long-term memory. We have RAM, which is your ability to keep track of a mental model of something you’re actively working on, and then there’s the CPU, which is the ability to make logical leaps and connections on that mental model (or maybe storage).

I’ve met different people throughout my career whose intelligence came in 1 specific area. For instance, my friend is extremely good at trivia, he clearly has a lot of storage and can access it easily. I think I’ve only met one person who was excellent in all three areas of intelligence.

Obviously this is a simplification, but it’s how I like to illustrate my ideas on intelligence at parties and first dates.

The amount of times I’ve invented something genius in software dev to later discover it has a name…

It’s a false definition of intelligence - remembering stuff has never been what intelligence is.

Understanding especially in the context of unknowns is what intelligence is.

I suspect any new thing created/discovered/etc is just combining knowledge from existing things with memories being an example. Outremembering while certainly not the only method helps massively with combining knowledge from existing things. I don't see new knowledge coming out of nothing.

Could just be that you aren’t an ideas guy/a lateral thinker

> I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us.

I wonder practically how useful it is. It should be very useful, right? Say you're a hiring manager, and now you can hire thousands of students who have almost eidetic memory across pretty much all the subjects. The students can produce amazing work if you give them specific instructions. They are also very good at mechanical pattern matching. That is, they are the uttermost crammers. They are like the students who don't really get STEM yet they could, through memorizing all the problem-solving patterns, ace any national college entrance examinations, IMOs, PHOs, Putnams, you name it, and all the way to solving hard problems like Sendov Conjecture - they even found out elegant elementary solutions! Mind you, Terrance Tao proved a weaker conclusion when studying the Sendov Conjecture and got to publish his work on The Big Four. That said, the students won't take initiatives, and they sometimes make very silly or even impossible mistakes, to the point that it requires your supervision and review. Would you hire them to do your company's work? I'd assume that answer is a resounding yes.

I feel like you can make the same analogy with products as well.

> Combine A + B

Really, compress. Compression is a useful proxy for intelligence.

To compress data efficiently, an entity must discover the underlying patterns, structures, and regularities within that data. Identifying these structures is precisely what we define as "understanding" or "intelligence.

Anything we put into writing can be thought of as a string of data. The Kolmogorov complexity of a string of data is the length of the shortest possible computer program that can output that string.

A good compressor doesn't just memorize (yes, there's a reason LLM writing features the "it's not just X, it's Y pattern"), it builds a generalized model to handle unseen, similar data. LLMs are trained by compressing the internet into weights, they use this to write new code.

When an LLM is trained, it compresses ...bytes of human text into a few ...bytes of neural network weights. When you ask it a question, it uses that compressed model to generate (decompress) a coherent response.

Consider the dichotomy:

LLMs display emergent reasoning, coding capabilities, and logic because they were forced to compress human language so tightly.

LLMs often suffer from "hallucinations" and struggle with novel logic puzzles because compression encourages mimicking statistical patterns rather than building a true causal model of the physical world.

An algorithm can achieve massive compression if it utilizes a highly complex, slow, or massive decompression engine. If a system takes 10 000 years to decompress a file, or requires an infinite amount of computing power (like Kolmogorov complexity), it cannot function as a practical intelligence. Real intelligence must operate within tight time and energy constraints.

> Maybe there's true brilliance out there

Brilliance is a trope. pg's 2009 "The Anatomy of Determination" deals with it: https://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html

In it, he argues that determination is the single most important predictor of success, surpassing even raw intelligence.

While popular culture loves the narrative of the "brilliant genius," Graham's experience backing hundreds of startups taught him that a highly intelligent person without drive quickly becomes ineffectual. Conversely, a profoundly determined individual can find pathways to success even in ordinary or unglamorous industries. Over time, determination actually starts to look like talent.

I'm going to commit a faux pas (a breach of HN etiquette) and give an AI summary in 3 bullet points because, well, the article deals with 3 points, so it's a good fit and I doubt I can compress it better than AI:

1. Willfulness. The desire to get your way regardless of obstacles or consequences.Being fearless about consequences and pushing through "hellacious" moments when others quit.

2. Discipline. The ability to force yourself to do what you planned to do. Being "hard on yourself" and turning off the background analysis in your mind that questions the plan.

3. Ambition. The grandness of your destination and what you want to achieve. Choosing the right target; if determination is a vector, ambition is the direction it points.

Of these 3, it's quite obvious at this point that LLMs are superior at 1) and 2), as LLM alignment is quite good, and it's ability to spin up sub-agents that can work for over 24 hrs is better than humans. Human limit is basically 1 hackathon's worth of cognitive work. Beyond that, health becomes a concern, and how many people can produce useful work under sleep deprivation? Codex can work for 24-ish hours, as evidenced by today's "Auto-research with codex: How I achieved a 232x Faster Kernel": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309549

So what's left for mere mortals? Apparently, nourishing your ambition:

"So here in sum is how determination seems to work: it consists of willfulness balanced with discipline, aimed by ambition. And fortunately at least two of these three qualities can be cultivated. You may be able to increase your strength of will somewhat; you can definitely learn self-discipline; and almost everyone is practically malnourished when it comes to ambition."

Not only I agree with you that I don't think I've had an original idea, even when I try to do artistic stuff it seems like the things most praised were the ones where I was trying to do something else and the good part came from failing to do the thing I was trying to do.

why would anybody believe true brilliance? They would only believe something that can be proved from combining existing knowledge.

If a time traveler went back to 1600 and started spouting off about differential equations everyone would think them quite mad.

I think that’s true for genius is in general. I don’t mean the Einstein type but I mean the child prodigies that graduate high school at 10 years old or whatever I mean if you can read something once and remember virtually everything about it that’s a gigantic leg up on everyone else who has to study drill the stuff into your head, etc.

Even in a debate, if somebody just has the ability to remember tons of facts and figures, the other person will seem unintelligent by comparison, even if the other person is correct

I've long held the belief that humans cannot truly create. We just remix and recombine. This is interesting - although I'm not religious, many religious texts call god the "Creator", perhaps because the ability to truly create original thought is above the ability of us humans. To truly create is divine. Maybe the writers of those old texts recognized this as well.