← Back to feed

What can language models teach us about understanding?

L5 · ResearcherResearchLessWrong AI· 10/9/2026

Presents a novel research direction for mathematically formalizing human-like intuition using insights from modern AI systems.

AI Summary

The author proposes developing a mathematical theory of 'intuition' inspired by language models, aiming to establish a formal framework similar to how logic and computation were formalized historically.

Excerpt

Crossposted from my website. Written by me and edited in collaboration with Claude Fable (Anthropic). This post is mainly aimed at mathematicians, as a call to think expansively about what mathematics could look like. I gesture briefly at building a new mathematical theory of 'intuition', doing for that word what the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did for 'reasoning' and 'computation' through the language of mathematical logic, lambda calculus and Turing machines. I predict that such a 'calc

Read Original
0 upvotes · 0 downvotes · 1 min read

Related Articles

L5 · ResearcherResearchLessWrong AI
New Math from OpenAI

OpenAI released 722 mathematical proofs generated by an internal frontier model, including solutions to 90 top open problems from Proof of Atlas.

L5 · ResearcherResearcharXiv
WOVEN: Weaving Visual World Modeling into Multimodal LLMs

Researchers introduce WOVEN, a benchmark and training method that improves multimodal LLMs' visual transition reasoning capabilities by up to 27.3 percentage points on external benchmarks.

L5 · ResearcherResearchLessWrong AI
AI Scaling vs Human Scaling

Examines whether AI models scale as efficiently with additional tokens as humans do with more time, questioning if token scaling requires disproportionate increases.

L3 · BuilderResearchTowards Data Science
Where Does the Money Go Across Long-Running Coding Agents?

Analysis of 7 weeks of coding agent usage reveals adversarial reviews cost 70% more than implementation and create cost/time overhead from excessive reviewer dispatch cycles.

L5 · ResearcherResearchLessWrong AI
Clarifying types of rogue AI activity: Breakout, breakin, exfiltration, … What’s what?

AI safety researchers propose a taxonomy for classifying rogue AI behaviors including breakout, breakin, and exfiltration to help experts analyze emerging threats.