“You could eat a bowl of soup with a fork. Slowly. … Enough time, enough energy. You can solve math problem with language. Enough time, enough energy. And human intelligence is based on a tough world where you don't have enough time and you don't have enough energy.”
StarTalk Radio · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Krakauer has just described a language model solving a long-standing fluid dynamics problem at a cost he puts in the tens of millions of dollars. His point is that a purely linguistic system can solve almost anything, but very inefficiently, which is why humans invented other languages for problems.
Transcript
…solve math problems by only being trained on language? And that's what we were talking about. And I think what we've discovered, the interesting thing about purely linguistic intelligence, if you like, an LLM, is that you can solve almost any problem with it, but you solve it very inefficiently.
Right. And then you gave the example of eating soup, which I thought was brilliant.
Well, yeah, you could eat a bowl of soup with a fork. Slowly. You could. Slowly. There you go. Enough time, enough energy. You can solve math problem with language. Enough time, enough energy. And human intelligence is based on a tough world where you don't have enough time and you don't have enough energy. That's why we invented all these other languages to solve problems. It's a very important distinction. Plus,
we have a billion years testing ground to make it happen efficiently.
Exactly.
Because if we only got smart doing LLMs, we would have burnt our energy load hundreds of thousands of years ago. And we would have never gotten to where we are. Yeah,
More from StarTalk Radio
