Reposted by Sam
This follow up seems to indicate that for Tao (one of) the missing piece(s) is continual learning:
![Phillip Rhodes
• 1d
@minderime
@tao - Could you define what you mean by
"current Al tools"? This is not a trivial detail, as many people who aren't "Al people" (and some who are) make the mistake of conflating "LLMs" and "Al" as though they are synonyms.
[…. Abbreviated]
Terence tão
@tao@mathstodon.xyz
@mindcrime 1 am referring to Al systems that are currently deployed, of which LLMs are the most prominent subclass. There are more speculative approaches to Al, such as those involving persistent and adaptive world models, which show some promise of going beyond stochastic cleverness, but they are still rather theoretical in nature.
Intelligence is of course famously difficult to pin down through operational definitions, rather than generalizing from examples, but one marker I would identify as a sign of intelligence is the ability to reliably converge (either individually, or through interaction with other intelligent agents) over time to an accurate and systematic understanding of a topic over time, even if intermediate stages of the understanding process applied to specific problems in this topic contained missteps, errors, or other types of confusion. When interacting with current models, I find that while they can sometimes have high accuracy and surprisingly insightful levels of understanding, these traits are not permanently learned, and tend to deteriorate over time as further conversation introduces errors and stochastic drift. (Also, they struggle to explain the sources of their insights and teach them to others.) One can use various tricks, such as clever prompting or very large context windows, to postpone this drift, but this does not fundamentally resolve the issue, in a way that I would expect a more intelligent system to inherently be able to handle.
Dec 21, 2025 at 02:05 PM - 0
-Wer
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December 22, 2025 at 12:25 PM
This follow up seems to indicate that for Tao (one of) the missing piece(s) is continual learning:
What isn't ever happening with Cloudflare?
November 18, 2025 at 1:21 PM
What isn't ever happening with Cloudflare?
Daily reminder that you have no edge.
November 18, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Daily reminder that you have no edge.