Given that LLMs can speak basically any language and answer almost any arbitrary question much like a human would, the claim that LLMs have comparable (not identical) thought processes to humans does not seem extraordinary at all.
The result of "predicting text" is that they obey orders, just like the result of "random electrochemical impulses in synapses" is that you typed your comment.
You can always reduce high-level phenomena to lower-level mechanisms. That doesn't mean that the high-level phenomenon doesn't exist. LLMs are obviously able to understand and follow instructions.
> The result of "predicting text" is that they obey orders
And yet they don't, quite a lot of the time, and in a random way that is hard to predict or even notice sometimes (their errors can be important but subtle/small).
They're simply not reliable enough to treat as independent agents, and this story is a good example of why not.
First, they do follow instructions most of the time, and the leading models get better and better at doing it month for month.
Second, whether they're perfect at following commands is besides the point. They're not just "predicting tokens," in the same way you're not just "sending electrochemical signals." LLMs think, solve problems, answer questions, write code, etc.
Intelligence is understanding low level stuff and using it to reason about and understand high level stuff.
When LLMs demonstrate "highly intelligent" behavior, like solving a complex math problem (high level stuff), but also simultaneously demonstrate that it does not know how to count (low level stuff that the high level stuff depends on), it proves that it is not actually "intelligent" and is not "reasoning".
tiananmen square was in 1989. Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light. Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses. You do not need to look back at the cultural revolution to see the prc for what it is.
Kent state saw 4 people unjustly killed. Tiananmen killed 100 to 1000x as many people and that’s just in the area with the reporters. The crackdowns in the other 300 cities without cameras were almost certainly much more brutal.
Going further, discussion about Kent state won’t get you in any trouble in the US, but discussing Tiananmen in China will get a far different response from the government.
Comparing the two only highlights just how much more extreme and repressive the Chinese system is despite all the US moves toward authoritarianism.
Is your contention that Hong Kong is also a totalitarian society? Have you been to Hong Kong in the last 5 years? I feel like people saying these sorts of things are just completely divorced from reality.
> Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses.
No. There were a few incidents very early on, when everyone was (quite understandably) panicking about a new, deadly virus that nobody had ever seen before, when some local city officials barred the doors of people who had just come from Wuhan. That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
What China did do quite extensively was border quarantine, and during localized outbreaks (caused by cases that slipped through quarantine at the border), mass testing and quarantine measures. This was during a once-in-a-generation pandemic that killed millions of people. In China, these measures saved several million lives. The estimates are that China's overall death rate was about 25% that of the US, and these measures are the reason. By the way, Taiwan and Australia took nearly identical measures, and I very much doubt that you would call them totalitarian societies.
> That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
Tell it to the people in Wuhan, and Shanghai, Urumqi, and other cities that had lockdowns. I was in Shanghai in 2022, I was confined to my apartment for nearly 3 months, you couldn't be more wrong.
Shanghai was locked down as a health measure during a major outbreak in the middle of a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world.
Lockdowns were done in many places in the world, including in Taiwan. I get that you're angry about being inconvenienced, but you weren't living in a totalitarian state. You were inconvenienced because there was a massive public health emergency, and the government had the choice of either locking down one city or letting the virus spread to the rest of the country and kill millions of people.
God I wish I could just block you. So called inconveniences in the name of so called massive public health emergency? First of all it was the Omicron variant, we knew its mortality rate is low, second it did spread to the rest of the country by the end of 2022 and killed millions of people, so what was the fucking point? If you have to downplay all suffering by calling them inconveniences, I guess there's no one could convince you anyway, you better hope it doesn't happen to you.
Anyway here are few links and videos for those curious what happened
Here's a fun one, a fake app for Covid Health Code, which was required to enter any public space and private business and even your home https://ilovexjp.pages.dev/
The Omicron variant killed more people worldwide (including in the US) than any other variant.
You were personally subject to quarantine measures in early 2022, and that irks you. On the hand, if you spent the pandemic in Shanghai, you were more free to go about your life than people were in the West for most of 2020-2021.
What argument? It was just contradiction, he didn't care how much evidences and points I brought. 3 months of trauma and depression and it is just merely irk in his eyes. It was just an unfunny, callous version monty python's sketch.
Are you claiming that major Chinese cloud providers like Tencent and Alibaba are pilfering trade secrets from their customers' data? To my knowledge, there's no evidence for that whatsoever. If it were true and came out, it would instantly tank their cloud businesses (which is why they don't do it, and why AWS, Azure, etc. also don't do it).
If it were to happen, Chinese law does offer recourse, including to foreign firms. It's not as if China doesn't have IP law. It has actually made a major effort over the last 10+ years to set up specialized courts just to deal with IP disputes, and I think foreign firms have a fairly good track record of winning cases.
> No one really believes at face value
This says a lot more about the prejudices and stereotypes in the West about China than it does about China itself.
In every one of these threads for a new Chinese open weights model, it's always the same tired discussion of how this is all actually a psyop by the Chinese government to undermine US interests and it can't answer questions about Tienanmen Square.
Meanwhile I'm over here solving real world business problems with a model that I can securely run on-prem and not pay out the nose for cloud GPU inference. And then after work I use that same model to power my personal experiments and hobby projects.
There are no Chinese labs with different financial and political motivations, there's only "China" the monolith. The last thread for Qwen's new hosted model was full of folks talking about how "China" is no longer releasing open weights models, when the next day Moonshot AI releases Kimi 2.6. A few days later and here's Qwen again with another open release.
For some reason this country gets what I assume are otherwise smart Americans to just completely shut off their brains and start repeating rhetoric.
> The last thread for Qwen's new hosted model was full of folks talking about how "China" is no longer releasing open weights models, when the next day Moonshot AI releases Kimi 2.6. A few days later and here's Qwen again with another open release.
looks like you declared win argument, because you now see that 2.6 was released, but at that time your opponents argument stand.
Also, you can't predict if Chinese labs will continue releasing open frontier models. Looks like Kimi is the only one left, Qwen is much smaller model.
> looks like you declared win argument, because you now see that 2.6 was released, but at that time your opponents argument stand.
Their argument was based entirely on speculation, but stated as a matter of fact, despite Alibaba making very clear statements that they were going to continue releasing open models.
And the core of my argument is that they were conflating a single company with the motivations of multiple companies in a country. Nobody talks about US companies by saying "The Americans are going to do X", they say "OpenAI/Anthropic/Google is going to do X".
If Israel uses nuclear weapons, that's the end of any shred of sympathy left for them in the world.
There would be massive political consequences for Israel. Sanctions, embargoes, no more ability to travel abroad, the end of any hope of any positive diplomatic relations with other countries, etc.
I'm not that optimistic, they're already accused of genocide in Gaza, rightfully so, and even the european countries that supposedly recognize the ICC in Hague don't arrest Netanyahu. US will of course back them up, as always.
As a result of Israel's actions over the last 2.5 years, world public opinion of Israel has tanked. There will already be serious consequences for Israel down the line because of that.
But it can get worse for Israel. Use of nuclear weapons is a massive taboo, and if Israel were to cross that line, it would be impossible for any government to continue to support Israel.
> Israel were to cross that line, it would be impossible for any government to continue to support Israel.
The same could be said for running a massive pedophile and human trafficking ring, but that line has been crossed and it seems that nobody seems to want to address the country that's found itself at the heart of it all.
>that's the end of any shred of sympathy left for them in the world. There would be massive political consequences for Israel
They genocided Palestine. They are bombing the shit out of Lebanon and will likely ethnically cleanse them too. Words have been said but no action has been taken. Nobody seems to give a shit.
Bibi could parachute into Mecca, take a shit on the Ka'aba, draw the Prophet (SWT) eating pork, and all we'd get would be a strong finger wagging from the US, Russia, France, etc... and no action.
>Sanctions, embargoes
Mossad has gathered enough blackmail over the years to ensure these won't work.
>no more ability to travel abroad
over 10% of Israel has dual citizenship with another country (mainly USA, Russia, France, Poland, Ukraine). Such restrictions won't affect them.
> the end of any hope of any positive diplomatic relations with other countries, etc.
Define "positive". Look at what Epstein did, yet the West as a whole (UK, France, US, etc) plus some MENA nations still hold Israel in the highest regard and refuse to critique them, much less break off diplomatic relations. I think you're being naive here
But not with continuity, not popularly over that whole time span.
If it's something we're all accustomed to and comfortable with, why even mention that it was being used in the distant past? The article is trying to simultaneously argue "try this new term they, it's easy, everybody's saying it now, it's modern, you'll love it" and "this term is not at all strange and new, you're silly if you feel uncomfortable with it because it has always been used." It's trying to have it both ways in its wrangling.
Do people also casually use it to refer to humans, or is it just me?
In my experience, everyone who complains about the use of the singular "they" uses it themselves all the time when they're not thinking about it.
The reason why there's any debate at all about the singular they is not because it's new and strange. It's because beginning in the mid-18th century, influential grammar textbooks started discouraging its use and advocating "he" in its place. Many generations of kids have grown up being told in school that the singular "they" is wrong, but despite that, it has remained a very standard part of spoken English.
Really, are you sure singular they was in widespread intemperate use, like today, prior to these influential Victorian grammarians?
OK, but they were influential, so they influenced the 1850s and subsequent decades, making this usage currently new and strange, because for a century or more people used he instead. Why deny that? To persuade them with the implication "we never got accustomed to saying he, turns out you didn't ever speak this way, it was just an illusion"?
I'm not sure what matters in persuading people to speak differently, but saying that a term is being revived, rather than being a complete neologism, is ... admittedly a little bit persuasive, but it doesn't much help with the glaring issue that it's still a major change from what we're used to: and there are additional valid complaints, firstly that it removes information, and secondly that it's used less sparingly than it was in the past. It's now commonly written, in formal texts where clarity matters.
This was for clarity in the phrasing of legislation.
I've picked up a rumor that this 1652 book encouraged the use of he in gender neutral contexts: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170... but I can't find where. It might just be an exaggeration based on the part where it says "The Maſculine is more worthy than the Feminine, and the Feminine is more worthy than the Neuter." But there's no doubt that the 17th century, never mind the 19th, was stuffed with sexist bastards in influential positions. So what's the use in pointing at the past, or even at the present, to say that some of the time they used they? Fundamentally you still have to argue for why, or why not.
> OK, but they were influential, so they influenced the 1850s and subsequent decades, making this usage currently new and strange, because for a century or more people used he instead. Why deny that?
They only succeeded in influencing formal writing. Singular "they" continued to be a completely normal and heavily used part of spoken English.
> but saying that a term is being revived, rather than being a complete neologism
It's only being "revived" in formal writing. It is style guides that are changing, not the way that normal people speak.
> there are additional valid complaints, firstly that it removes information
It allows you to not specify that information. Sometimes you genuinely have no idea what gender the person you're talking about is. "Someone is knocking on the door. I have no idea who they are."
> Fundamentally you still have to argue for why, or why not.
The argument is that style guides and grammarians artificially banned people from using a completely regular pronoun in formal writing, and that the alternative they offered (gender-neutral "he") is extremely awkward. We already use this pronoun this way in spoken English. We should be able to write it too.
1/4-1/3 EVs is an underestimate for somewhere like Shenzhen (probably for Beijing too). It's going to be well over 50% there. And virtually all scooters will be electric.
You're right about the smoking, though. It's a massive problem.
it's definitely not underestimate for Beijing where I stayed for 3 weeks this summer, maybe you count PHEV as EVs, many of those cars which look like EVs are actually hybrids, only in late 2025 China reached 50% newly registered BEV+PHEV cars plus there are lots of previously registered cars and if we count only BEVs the percentage will be much smaller, actually I think 1/3 of BEV on the road is quite an overestimate from my side
are NEV common? sure. do BEV make majority of cars on the road? for sure not
there are basically none scooters, they use either (e)bikes or electric motorbikes/mopeds (these are not new, they used them en masse already 10 years ago)
Looking into this a bit more, it seems that 20% of the total number of registered vehicles in Beijing are NEV vehicles, but that a far larger percentage of cars on the road at any given moment are NEVs. That's because almost all taxis (and buses) are NEVs.
By the way, NEVs might have only reached 50% of new registrations across all of China in late 2025, but in Tier-1 cities, it has been far higher than 50% for years. It's extremely difficult to even get a license plate for an ICE car in major Chinese cities. You have to enter a lottery, with a very low chance of winning. Even if you do get a license plate, you're banned from driving on one weekday every week.
It's extremely difficult even to get NEV license plate, trust me I talked with many of those taxi drivers who drove me every single day during those 3 weeks about how much they paid for car, how long it took to register it. The benefit of NEV passed years ago already, even for NEV license plate you have to wait years.
reply