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Notes -
Please explain.
In a 2023 article, notorious physicist, Mathematica designer and crank Stephen Wolfram made predictions about the future of LLMs and how they should be understood in the face of what is still somewhat mysterious: why is it they work so well and what's the actual limit of their application.
In it he argues that the reason LLMs work so well is actually that language was easier to model than we expected, but importantly that this does not mean that other hard problems should be expected to be solved because he doesn't believe that these solutions are contained within language, those problems are, he argues, irreducible and must be solved independently.
His claims may be dismissed on account of how many real world problems have since been solved through "mere" language application, and on account of the fact that it's a self serving claim. Indeed Wolfram claims that LLMs must be augmented by tools that actually solve formal problems when that's exactly what his company sells.
I think that OP's observations show why in the end, though he disagreed as to where the complexity really lies, Wolfram may have had the right framing overall. The limits of the applicability of the technology will indeed be the limits of language as a formalism, even if they are wider than we originally anticipated.
Thanks!
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