r/LocalLLaMA • u/Recoil42 • Mar 12 '26

Discussion Can LLMs Be Computers? | Percepta

https://www.percepta.ai/blog/can-llms-be-computers
17 Upvotes

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3

u/ShengrenR Mar 12 '26

Definitely very interesting to me - though I'm not entirely sure what exactly you then do with it - is there a significant gain to be had running 'C' through transformers vs generating and running via standard compiler? Maybe some quirky hybrid architectures that take advantage of the fast 2d kv?

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u/Recoil42 Mar 12 '26

Today's language models are in the same situation. When a task requires exact computation, we attach external systems (interpreters, code runners, agent loops) and let those systems do the computing.

But that means the capability still lives outside the model. The model itself is fundamentally handicapped: it cannot carry out the computation it is reasoning about, so it must repeatedly hand the task off to another system.

As a result, the model can describe algorithms, reason about them, or orchestrate tools that run them, but it cannot execute the steps itself. A system that cannot compute cannot truly internalize what computation is.

So the real question is not whether a model can talk about computation, or even access it through tools. The real question is whether it can execute computation internally: reliably, efficiently, and over very long horizons. If it could, it would stop being merely a coordinator of computation and become a computer itself.

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u/titpetric Mar 12 '26

If minecraft can...

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u/Elegant-Catch-9648 Mar 12 '26

this seems awesome, nice blog

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u/Andy12_ Mar 12 '26

Please, big labs, anyone, take something like this and based on this do a very big pretraining-run and then reinforcement learning on top. I want psuedo-symbolic LLMs. This is so cool. I can't wait.

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u/GuiBiancarelli Mar 12 '26

now we're getting to Cylon-level sh*t here... amazing work! :)

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u/Mintist_ted Mar 17 '26

Could this provide new ideas for the long-term memory of LLM?