LLMs are current level are already phenomenal. Enough to usher in a new industrial revolution even without further progress. Also still remarkable how untethered or nonsensical their reasoning can be, even with Opus 4.6 or similar.

Ex1. I was working on parking brake issue with my car, comparing the clamping force I was getting the wheel with the observation that it had wanted to roll down the hill. I told it I was getting enough clamping to be unable to turn the wheel by hand.

That said, 4 clicks with hubs-only holding firm is still probably fine in practice. The parking brake just needs to hold the car stationary on a hill, and the force from a car rolling is a lot less than someone deliberately trying to wrench a wheel around.

No, a 2,400lb car rolling down the hill exerts a lot more force than me trying to turn it at the wheel studs, let me tell ya.

Ex2. I was setting of a long-running gene analysis job. A while after it had started, I asked if actually we could parallelize it. Claudes says yes, absolutely, there's a parameter already for that. I ask it to estimate whether it'd make sense to stop and restart the job. Yes, it says, would take half the time – but we've already started it so might as well let it finish.

I feel like I get some many of these bonkers inferences, that there's something interesting here to reconcile with the brilliance they have in other moments.