The third 'lab note'. More on the power and Achilles' heel of "brute force trial and error with token pattern statistics"
Category: Background Knowledge
Serious coding with LLMs. Lab notes 2026-09-27: Codex succeeds, Claude reviews the result.
The second 'lab note'. More on the power and Achilles' heel of "brute force trial and error with token pattern statistics"
Serious coding with LLMs. Lab notes 2026-09-25: Codex vs Claude Code, Usage Limit Resets
Before publishing about my very serious LLM-coding experiment, I am publishing a few shorter 'lab notes'. This is the first one.
Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
Coding with LLMs (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) is often presented as the 'killer app' for Generative AI. But looking at data, it seems the one piece of the puzzle missing is actual cost. A quest into getting a less muddy picture about what is going on, with surprising results.
The key to real intelligence might be imagination
Just copied from an earlier version on LinkedIn, a short article describing the key role of imagination in intelligence and why that may mean that self-driving cars require true intelligence and more than just reacting to sensors.
AI-generated podcast AI-slopcast
We introduce a new term: "AI-slopcast". This is a podcast that is created by Generative AI and — surprise! — is AI-slop. The victim: one of my own posts.
AI has invented a new language, and added sex to a dull office context
It turns out that AI has created a whole new language. Humans do not speak it, and they may even mistake it for talk about sex. But luckily Generative AI is able to translate it to something humans can understand (and where the sex doesn't show up).
Generative AI ‘reasoning models’ don’t reason, even if it seems they do
'Reasoning models' such as GPT4-o3 have become a well known member of the Generative AI family. But look inside and while they add a certain depth, at the same time they add nothing at all. Not 'reasoning' anyway. Just another 'level of indirection' when approximating. Sometimes powerful. Always costly.
Let’s call GPT and Friends: ‘Wide AI’ (and not ‘AGI’)
GPT-3o has done very well on the ARC-AGI-PUB benchmark. Sam Altman has also claimed OpenAI is confident that it can build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). But that may be based on confusions around 'learning'. On the difference between narrow, general and (introducing) 'wide' AI.
Google’s ‘Willow’ quantum computer: impressive science and misleading marketing
Google has announced 'Willow', a quantum computer that can calculate so fast it would take a supercomputer 10 septillion (a 10 with 25 zeros) years to do the same. But while the science is real and cool, the message is misleading. An explainer for non-physicists.
