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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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I don't think you can say for sure that they don't have a "world model" hidden somewhere in their trillion-dimensional space. I've certainly used them in ways that seem to require one, and while it's certainly possible that it's because they're faking it with statistics and I'm overestimating the difficulty of what I ask ... the argument does have to trail off at some point, right? You have to include some way to show that they really do "understand causal relationships" (even if it's just through preponderance of evidence), otherwise you're using unfalsifiable faith-based reasoning to assert that only human intelligence is real intelligence.

What they definitely don't have is temporal persistence of thought, just because of their actual mechanics. (CoT reasoning is a patch to this, but an imperfect one.) A priori, I would have thought this was necessary to do complex reasoning.

And I would advise heavily discounting anything Gary Marcus says. He's just enjoying a career as a self-purported "expert" that the media can go to whenever they want a skeptical quote, but almost every testable claim he's made has been wrong.