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LLMs can't synthesize information and nobody's talking about it I was looking into Yoji Akao's book on Quality Function Deployment last week. 1st thing I noticed: half the pages are charts Guess what it takes for an LLM to convey the same level of information as a single one of these charts?

I ran the numbers. For one A3-size chart, the LLM wrote down: - 8 sections - 33 paragraphs - 1,048 words - 7 A4 pages for the same level of information

A person can scan the chart in about 30 seconds and you can kickstart a team discussion around the chart in a matter of minutes Meanwhile, the LLM-produced document requires the entire team to go through the 7 pages and mentally map the related information before anything

It's also exactly what LLMs can't do. Ask one for a diagram and you'll see it. It produces a picture of a chart, not a chart that does the thinking for you So here's what I keep coming back to

We've taught these models to write, to code, to reason out loud. We haven't taught them to draw, to take a mess of relationships and compress it into one thing you can see Until we do, "synthesis" stays a human skill. And I'm not sure the labs are even pointing at it