The article makes the assumption that Tesla and EcoFlow are the leaders. They're not. They're the expensive US targeted systems. For anyone wanting to learn more about other systems Will Prowse on YT [0] is an amazing resource for best of breed.
Will is so awesome. I chuckle every time I see his name as a supporter of police activity vids. And the ongoing battle born saga vids are hilarious and terrifying
Will is a true reviewer and one of the few, in the power space, worth even watching. He did a rare reaction video to some guy who gave all incorrect information for configuring a high voltage system [0] about 5 months ago which does an amazing job of showcasing his domain expertise.
Will does a great job distilling a ton of useful information without any sort of agenda. I've purchased his books simply to support him. I'm glad to have watched him go from his early days to a lot of success just by being himself and staying honest to his reviews. Brilliant young guy.
It's also interesting Garry Tan (YC Partner) has a lot of comments for the masses when it's on a one sided platform like X. But, will never engage here. Oh the irony.
He seems to enjoy spreading factually misguided "statistics" [0] about how Flock is "solving crime". OK buddy.
I mean, just look at how he enagages with those replies. If that's at the helm of YC? WTF.
He and the entire tech ecosystem is in a bubble where being as right wing as possible is currency. Literally middle of the road liberal pg is basically a communist compared to this ecosystem now. It’s extremely short sighted on their part as the dialectic is guaranteed to flip back the other way. Much better to hold your own genuine beliefs than to kowtow to whatever is popular at the time
The “left” view points of the US currently seem to be similar to Reagan. The furthest left I’ve seen the US go in my lifetime is about David Cameron or Boris Johnson levels of “left”.
Bernie Sanders was nearly the Democratic candidate for president and is still the most popular politician in American politics. However, this countries politics is completely and totally captured by moneyed interests. Our political leadership is openly corrupt and has been for decades. And of course about every decade the US commits another atrocity against some sovereign nation or the other. It does feel a bit hopeless at times
So the TL;DR here is... If you're in the business of recreating wheels - then you're in luck! We've automated wheel recreation to an acceptable degree of those wheels being true.
Most physical engineers are just applying known techniques all the time too. Most products or bridges or whatever are not solving some heretofore-unsolved problem.
> They are helping their users create things that didn't exist before.
That is a derived output. That isn't new as in: novel. It may be unique but it is derived from training data. LLMs legitimately cannot think and thus they cannot create in that way.
I will find this often-repeated argument compelling only when someone can prove to me that the human mind works in a way that isn't 'combining stuff it learned in the past'.
5 years ago a typical argument against AGI was that computers would never be able to think because "real thinking" involved mastery of language which was something clearly beyond what computers would ever be able to do. The implication was that there was some magic sauce that human brains had that couldn't be replicated in silicon (by us). That 'facility with language' argument has clearly fallen apart over the last 3 years and been replaced with what appears to be a different magic sauce comprised of the phrases 'not really thinking' and the whole 'just repeating what it's heard/parrot' argument.
I don't think LLM's think or will reach AGI through scaling and I'm skeptical we're particularly close to AGI in any form. But I feel like it's a matter of incremental steps. There isn't some magic chasm that needs to be crossed. When we get there I think we will look back and see that 'legitimately thinking' wasn't anything magic. We'll look at AGI and instead of saying "isn't it amazing computers can do this" we'll say "wow, was that all there is to thinking like a human".
> 5 years ago a typical argument against AGI was that computers would never be able to think because "real thinking" involved mastery of language which was something clearly beyond what computers would ever be able to do.
Mastery of words is thinking? In that line of argument then computers have been able to think for decades.
Humans don't think only in words. Our context, memory and thoughts are processed and occur in ways we don't understand, still.
There's a lot of great information out there describing this [0][1]. Continuing to believe these tools are thinking, however, is dangerous. I'd gather it has something to do with logic: you can't see the process and it's non-deterministic so it feels like thinking. ELIZA tricked people. LLMs are no different.
That's the crazy thing. Yes, in fact, it turns out that language encodes and embodies reasoning. All you have to do is pile up enough of it in a high-dimensional space, use gradient descent to model its original structure, and add some feedback in the form of RL. At that point, reasoning is just a database problem, which we currently attack with attention.
No one had the faintest clue. Even now, many people not only don't understand what just happened, but they don't think anything happened at all.
There's no such thing as people without language, except for infants and those who are so mentally incapacitated that the answer is self-evidently "No, they cannot."
Language is the substrate of reason. It doesn't need to be spoken or written, but it's a necessary and (as it turns out) sufficient component of thought.
There are quite a few studies to refute this highly ignorant comment. I'd suggest some reading [0].
From the abstract:
"Is thought possible without language? Individuals with global aphasia, who have almost no ability to understand or produce language, provide a powerful opportunity to find out. Astonishingly, despite their near-total loss of language, these individuals are nonetheless able to add and subtract, solve logic problems, think about another person’s thoughts, appreciate music, and successfully navigate their environments. Further, neuroimaging studies show that healthy adults strongly engage the brain’s language areas when they understand a sentence, but not when they perform other nonlinguistic tasks like arithmetic, storing information in working memory, inhibiting prepotent responses, or listening to music. Taken together, these two complementary lines of evidence provide a clear answer to the classic question: many aspects of thought engage distinct brain regions from, and do not depend on, language."
The resources that the brain is using to think -- whatever resources those are -- are language-based. Otherwise there would be no way to communicate with the test subjects. "Language" doesn't just imply written and spoken text, as these researchers seem to assume.
There’s linguistic evidence that, while language influences thought, it does not determine thought - see the failure of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is one of the most widely studied and robust linguistic results - we actually know for a fact that language does not determine or define thought.
How's the replication rate in that field? Last I heard it was below 50%.
How can you think without tokens of some sort? That's half of the question that has to be answered by the linguists. The other half is that if language isn't necessary for reasoning, what is?
We now know that a conceptually-simple machine absolutely can reason with nothing but language as inputs for pretraining and subsequent reinforcement. We didn't know that before. The linguists (and the fMRI soothsayers) predicted none of this.
Read about linguistic history and make up your own mind, I guess. Or don’t, I don’t care. You’re dismissing a series of highly robust scientific results because they fail to validate your beliefs, which is highly irrational. I'm no longer interested in engaging with you.
I've read plenty of linguistics work on a lay basis. It explains little and predicts even less, so it hasn't exactly encouraged me to delve further into the field. That said, linguistics really has nothing to do with arguments with the Moon-landing deniers in this thread, who are the people you should really be targeting with your advocacy of rationality.
In other words, when I (seem to) dismiss an entire field of study, it's because it doesn't work, not because it does work and I just don't like the results.
> ELIZA, ROFL. How'd ELIZA do at the IMO last year?
What's funny is the failure to grasp any contextual framing of ELIZA. When it came out people were impressed by it's reasoning, it's responses. And in your line of defense it could think because it had mastery of words!
But fast forward the current timeline 30 years. You will have been of the same camp that argued on behalf of ELIZA when the rest of the world was asking, confusingly: how did people think ChatGPT could think?
No one was impressed with ELIZA's "reasoning" except for a few non-specialist test subjects recruited from the general population. Admittedly it was disturbing to see how strongly some of those people latched onto it.
Meanwhile, you didn't answer my question. How'd ELIZA do on the IMO? If you know a way to achieve gold-medal performance at top-level math and programming competitions without thinking, I for one am all ears.
> I will find this often-repeated argument compelling only when someone can prove to me that the human mind works in a way that isn't 'combining stuff it learned in the past'.
That is a pedantic distinction. You can create something that didn't exist by combining two things that did exist, in a way of combining things that already existed. For example, you could use a blender to combine almond butter and sawdust. While this may not be "novel", and it may be derived from existing materials and methods, you may still lay claim to having created something that didn't exist before.
For a more practical example, creating bindings from dynamic-language-A for a library in compiled-language-B is a genuinely useful task, allowing you to create things that didn't exist before. Those things are likely to unlock great happiness and/or productivity, even if they are derived from training data.
> That is a pedantic distinction. You can create something that didn't exist by combining two things that did exist, in a way of combining things that already existed.
This is the definition of a derived product. Call it a derivative work if we're being pedantic and, regardless, is not any level of proof that LLMs "think".
Yeah you’ve lost me here I’m sorry. In the real world humans work with AI tools to create new things. What you’re saying is the equivalent of “when a human writes a book in English, because they use words and letters that already exist and they already know they aren’t creating anything new”.
Why is that kind of thinking required to create novel works?
Randomness can create novelty.
Mistakes can be novel.
There are many ways to create novelty.
Also I think you might not know how LLMs are trained to code. Pre-training gives them some idea of the syntax etc but that only gets you to fancy autocomplete.
Modern LLMs are heavily trained using reinforcement data which is custom task the labs pay people to do (or by distilling another LLM which has had the process performed on it).
You’re using ‘derived’ to imply ‘therefore equivalent.’ That’s a category error. A cookbook is derived from food culture. Does an LLM taste food? Can it think about how good that cookie tastes?
A flight simulator is derived from aerodynamics - yet it doesn’t fly.
Likewise, text that resembles reasoning isn’t the same thing as a system that has beliefs, intentions, or understanding. Humans do. LLMs don't.
Also... Ask an LLM what's the difference between a human brain and an LLM. If an LLM could "think" it wouldn't give you the answer it just did.
Ask an LLM what's the difference between a human brain and an LLM. If an LLM could "think" it wouldn't give you the answer it just did.
I imagine that sounded more profound when you wrote it than it did just now, when I read it. Can you be a little more specific, with regard to what features you would expect to differ between LLM and human responses to such a question?
Right now, LLM system prompts are strongly geared towards not claiming that they are humans or simulations of humans. If your point is that a hypothetical "thinking" LLM would claim to be a human, that could certainly be arranged with an appropriate system prompt. You wouldn't know whether you were talking to an LLM or a human -- just as you don't now -- but nothing would be proved either way. That's ultimately why the Turing test is a poor metric.
> Right now, LLM system prompts are strongly geared towards not claiming that they are humans or simulations of humans. If your point is that a hypothetical "thinking" LLM would claim to be a human, that could certainly be arranged with an appropriate system prompt. You wouldn't know whether you were talking to an LLM or a human -- just as you don't now -- but nothing would be proved either way. That's ultimately why the Turing test is a poor metric.
The mental gymnastics here is entertainment at best. Of course the thinking LLM would give feedback on how it's actually just a pattern model over text - well, we shouldn't believe that! The LLM was trained to lie about it's true capabilities in your own admission?
How about these...
What observable capability would you expect from "true cognitive thought" that a next-token predictor couldn’t fake?
Where are the system’s goals coming from—does it originate them, or only reflect the user/prompt?
How does it know when it’s wrong without an external verifier? If the training data says X and the answer is Y - how will it ever know it was wrong and reach the correct conclusion?
How does it know when it’s wrong without an external verifier? If the training data says X and the answer is Y - how will it ever know it was wrong and reach the correct conclusion?
You need to read a few papers with publication dates after 2023.
You’re arguing against a straw man. No one is claiming LLMs have beliefs, intentions, or understanding. They don’t need them to be economically useful.
And beyond people claiming that LLMs are basically sentient you have people like CamperBob2 who made this wild claim:
"""There's no such thing as people without language, except for infants and those who are so mentally incapacitated that the answer is self-evidently "No, they cannot."
Language is the substrate of reason. It doesn't need to be spoken or written, but it's a necessary and (as it turns out) sufficient component of thought."""
Let that sink. They literally think that there's no such thing as people without language. Talk about a wild and ignorant take on life in general!
Could you give us an idea of what you’re hoping for that is not possible to derive from training data of the entire internet and many (most?) published books?
This is the problem, the entire internet is a really bad set of training data because it’s extremely polluted.
Also the derived argument doesn’t really hold, just because you know about two things doesn’t mean you’d be able to come up with the third, it’s actually very hard most of the time and requires you to not do next token prediction.
The emergent phenomenon is that the LLM can separate truth from fiction when you give it a massive amount of data. It can figure the world out just as we can figure it out when we are as well inundated with bullshit data. The pathways exist in the LLM but it won’t necessarily reveal that to you unless you tune it with RL.
> The emergent phenomenon is that the LLM can separate truth from fiction when you give it a massive amount of data.
I don't believe they can. LLMs have no concept of truth.
What's likely is that the "truth" for many subjects is represented way more than fiction and when there is objective truth it's consistently represented in similar way. On the other hand there are many variations of "fiction" for the same subject.
They can and we have definitive proof. When we tune LLM models with reinforcement learning the models end up hallucinating less and becoming more reliable. Basically in a nut shell we reward the model when telling the truth and punish it when it’s not.
So think of it like this, to create the model we use terabytes of data. Then we do RL which is probably less than one percent of additional data involved in the initial training.
The change in the model is that reliability is increased and hallucinations are reduced at a far greater rate than one percent. So much so that modern models can be used for agentic tasks.
How can less than one percent of reinforcement training get the model to tell the truth greater than one percent of the time?
The answer is obvious. It ALREADY knew the truth. There’s no other logical way to explain this. The LLM in its original state just predicts text but it doesn’t care about truth or the kind of answer you want. With a little bit of reinforcement it suddenly does much better.
It’s not a perfect process and reinforcement learning often causes the model to be deceptive an not necessarily tell the truth but it more gives an answer that may seem like the truth or an answer that the trainer wants to hear. In general though we can measurably see a difference in truthfulness and reliability to an extent far greater than the data involved in training and that is logical proof it knows the difference.
Additionally while I say it knows the truth already this is likely more of a blurry line. Even humans don’t fully know the truth so my claim here is that an LLM knows the truth to a certain extent. It can be wildly off for certain things but in general it knows and this “knowing” has to be coaxed out of the model through RL.
Keep in mind the LLM is just auto trained on reams and reams of data. That training is massive. Reinforcement training is done on a human basis. A human must rate the answers so it is significantly less.
> The answer is obvious. It ALREADY knew the truth. There’s no other logical way to explain this.
I can think of several offhand.
1. The effect was never real, you've just convinced yourself it is because you want it to be, ie you Clever Hans'd yourself.
2. The effect is an artifact of how you measure "truth" and disappears outside that context ("It can be wildly off for certain things")
3. The effect was completely fabricated and is the result of fraud.
If you want to convince me that "I threatened a statistical model with a stick and it somehow got more accurate, therefore it's both intelligent and lying" is true, I need a lot less breathless overcredulity and a lot more "I have actively tried to disprove this result, here's what I found"
You asked for something concrete, so I’ll anchor every claim to either documented results or directly observable training mechanics.
First, the claim that RLHF materially reduces hallucinations and increases factual accuracy is not anecdotal. It shows up quantitatively in benchmarks designed to measure this exact thing, such as TruthfulQA, Natural Questions, and fact verification datasets like FEVER. Base models and RL-tuned models share the same architecture and almost identical weights, yet the RL-tuned versions score substantially higher. These benchmarks are external to the reward model and can be run independently.
Second, the reinforcement signal itself does not contain factual information. This is a property of how RLHF works. Human raters provide preference comparisons or scores, and the reward model outputs a single scalar. There are no facts, explanations, or world models being injected. From an information perspective, this signal has extremely low bandwidth compared to pretraining.
Third, the scale difference is documented by every group that has published training details. Pretraining consumes trillions of tokens. RLHF uses on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of human judgments. Even generous estimates put it well under one percent of the total training signal. This is not controversial.
Fourth, the improvement generalizes beyond the reward distribution. RL-tuned models perform better on prompts, domains, and benchmarks that were not part of the preference data and are evaluated automatically rather than by humans. If this were a Clever Hans effect or evaluator bias, performance would collapse when the reward model is not in the loop. It does not.
Fifth, the gains are not confined to a single definition of “truth.” They appear simultaneously in question answering accuracy, contradiction detection, multi-step reasoning, tool use success, and agent task completion rates. These are different evaluation mechanisms. The only common factor is that the model must internally distinguish correct from incorrect world states.
Finally, reinforcement learning cannot plausibly inject new factual structure at scale. This follows from gradient dynamics. RLHF biases which internal activations are favored, it does not have the capacity to encode millions of correlated facts about the world when the signal itself contains none of that information. This is why the literature consistently frames RLHF as behavior shaping or alignment, not knowledge acquisition.
Given those facts, the conclusion is not rhetorical. If a tiny, low-bandwidth, non-factual signal produces large, general improvements in factual reliability, then the information enabling those improvements must already exist in the pretrained model. Reinforcement learning is selecting among latent representations, not creating them.
You can object to calling this “knowing the truth,” but that’s a semantic move, not a substantive one. A system that internally represents distinctions that reliably track true versus false statements across domains, and can be biased to express those distinctions more consistently, functionally encodes truth.
Your three alternatives don’t survive contact with this. Clever Hans fails because the effect generalizes. Measurement artifact fails because multiple independent metrics move together. Fraud fails because these results are reproduced across competing labs, companies, and open-source implementations.
If you think this is still wrong, the next step isn’t skepticism in the abstract. It’s to name a concrete alternative mechanism that is compatible with the documented training process and observed generalization. Without that, the position you’re defending isn’t cautious, it’s incoherent.
Your three alternatives don’t survive contact with this. Clever Hans fails because the effect generalizes. Measurement artifact fails because multiple independent metrics move together. Fraud fails because these results are reproduced across competing labs, companies, and open-source implementations.
He doesn't care. You might as well be arguing with a Scientologist.
I’ll give it a shot. He’s hiding behind that clever Hans story, thinking he’s above human delusion, but the reality is he’s the picture perfect example of how humans fool themselves. It’s so ironic.
From what you've described an LLM has not invented anything. LLMs that can reason have a bit more slight of hand but they're not coming up with new ideas outside of the bounds of what a lot of words have encompassed in both fiction and non.
Good for you that you've got a fun token of code that's what you've always wanted, I guess. But this type of fantasy take on LLMs seems to be more and more prevalent as of late. A lot of people defending LLMs as if they're owed something because they've built something or maybe people are getting more and more attached to them from the conversational angle. I'm not sure, but I've run across more people in 2025 that are way too far in the deep end of personifying their relationships with LLMs.
Hang on, you're now saying that if something has ever been described in fiction it doesn't count as invention? So if somebody literally developed a working photon torpedo, that isn't new because "Star Trek Did It"?
Well, they can use tools, and tools includes physics simulations, so if it is possible (and FWIW the tool-free "intuition" of ChatGPT is "there will never be an age of antimatter"), then why couldn't LLMs grind those tools to get a solution?
You seem to be pretty far down the rabbit hole. How about this... You task an LLM to create a photon torpedo. If it can truly think then it should be able to provide you with something tangible. When you've got that in hand let us all know.
Back to the land of reality... Describing something in fiction doesn’t magically make it "not an invention". Fiction can anticipate an idea, but invention is about producing a working, testable implementation and usually involves novel technical methods. "Star Trek did it" is at most prior art for the concept, not a blueprint for the mechanism. If you can't understand that differential then maybe go ask an LLM.
> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.
Unnecessarily smug?
Beyond that they can be stopped. They're being met with a lot of resistance in the Midwest as they're attempting to be built without much understanding of the public utilities impact. People are catching on to the fact that energy and water consumption is pushing up costs for residents. A lot of assumptions are supporting this argument.
> The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
I like the gymnastics of wordplay here. Efficient only when you look at them through the lens of some ephemeral timeframe that may or may not exist.
Beyond wasteful the linked article can't even remotely be taken seriously.
> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
And then we get this gem...
> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.
This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.
Edge injection works extremely well, but still has distance limitations. You're not going past 20m per segment of power with something like WS2811s. There's no way to do 50m without power injection within the segment, even with 24v strips. That is unless they're not RGB or low density.
There's many guides out there for exactly this, but this one from QuinLED is probably the best [0].
You can't really avoid power injection downstream. I'm not sure if you're using 24v LEDs based on your ask (you said rails). But even with 24v strips at 20m you'll need 4A edge injection with 720 LED/m. This is literally one of the most simplistic approaches without being under powered.
[0] https://heatbit.com/
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