from the orange site thread:

Neural networks are not new, and they’re just mathematical systems. LLMs don’t think. At all. They’re basically glorified autocorrect. What they’re good for is generating a lot of natural-sounding text that fools people into thinking there’s more going on than there really is.

Obvious question: can Prolog do reasoning?

If your definition of reasoning excludes Prolog, then… I’m not sure what to say!

this is a very specific sneer, but it’s a fucking head trip when you’ve got in-depth knowledge of whichever obscure shit the orange site’s fetishizing at the moment. I like Prolog a lot, and I know it pretty well. it’s intentionally very far from a generalized reasoning engine. in fact, the core inference algorithm and declarative subset of Prolog (aka Datalog) is equivalent to tuple relational calculus; that is, it’s no more expressive than a boring SQL database or an ECS game engine. Prolog itself doesn’t even have the solving power of something like a proof assistant (much less doing anything like thinking); it’s much closer to a dependent type system (which is why a few compilers implement Datalog solvers for type checking).

in short, it’s fucking wild to see the same breathless shit from the 80s AI boom about Prolog somehow being an AI language with a bunch of emphasis on the AI, as if it were a fucking thinking program (instead of a cozy language that elegantly combines elements of a database with a simple but useful logic solver) revived and thoughtlessly applied simultaneously to both Prolog and GPT, without any pause to maybe think about how fucking stupid that is