norvid_studies @norvid_studies
— quoting Yuxi on the Wired (@layer07_yuxi) replying to @Algon_33
norvid_studies @norvid_studies
I didn't know the historical version but oddly this *exact* objection was made to LLMs, iirc by lecun(?). the LLM has some chance of an error at every token. the error chance blows up as length increases. if it makes any error, the entire computation fails...
"[Historians of computing might remember when von Neumann came on the scene in the 1940s, there was an objection to classical computers that goes like "Computers are made of gates. Gates have errors. As soon as you get an error, the rest of the computation is bunk. The probability of *not* making an error is exponentially decaying. Therefore, upper bound to how much can be computed reliably is very small -- logarithmically small!" Von Neumann said no with his threshold theorem. If the individual gates are reliable enough, then you can build composite gates of arbitrarily high reliability.]"
> QUOTED: Yuxi on the Wired @layer07_yuxi · Oct 6
> Replying to @Algon_33
> Your objection is difficult to understand. Do you mean that mathematician's intuition is more reliable than proofchecker? This is an incredible statement. We[?] is false. How many times have mathematician's in...
> Show more
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet drawing an analogy between the historical "gates have errors, so computation is fundamentally limited" objection to classical computers (resolved by von Neumann's threshold theorem) and the modern objection to LLMs (attributed to LeCun) that per-token error probability compounds and caps reliable output length. Relevant to Nathan's interest in AI capability trajectories and arguments about LLM reliability limits.
llm reliabilityvon neumann threshold theoremyann lecunai capabilitiescomputer science historytwitter