LLMs break down in funny ways when told the Jacobian Conjecture counterargument
17 hours ago
- Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge tweeted a counterargument to the Jacobian Conjecture, verified via Claude Fable 5 and empirically confirmed.
- The counterargument creates a paradox for LLMs: they can verify it mathematically but their knowledge cutoff says the conjecture is unsolved, leading to confusion.
- The author tested 14 LLMs with the same query about the counterargument, observing varied responses: some verified, some rejected, some got confused.
- A variant prompt attributing the discovery to a cat elicited humorous and snarky responses from the same LLMs.
- LLMs handled the cognitive dissonance relatively gracefully, contrary to the 'DOES NOT COMPUTE' trope from science fiction.