Fleuret Clashes Over 'Lookup Table Can Beat Humans at Go' Analogy
francoisfleuret · x · 2026-10-10
A debate over what LLMs fundamentally are: a researcher argued that 'a big lookup table can beat the best humans at Go' (as AlphaZero shows how to fill it), but we don't know how to fill one for room-temperature superconductivity or cancer.
François Fleuret pushed back: that stretches the meaning of 'lookup table' as much as the Chinese Room stretches the meaning of 'book' — implying AlphaZero learned a generalizable policy rather than memorizing answers, so the analogy to LLMs is conceptually flawed.
Related event: LeCun and Lample Push Back on Fleuret's AlphaZero Challenge to LLM Skeptics(9 posts)→
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