This post was originally published on the main website on Apr 11
2026.
I am reposting it here for SEO reasons and enabling humble bumble discussions with the DEV community.
Feel free to engage with this post and i am available to respond during weekends.
Sorry about the spam posting all the blogs in one day.
I forgor about my dev account <3!
Hey everyone 👋, In my previous post, LLMs are Useful.
LMMs will Break Reality, I made a case that language models are genuinely useful tools trapped inside a symbolic cage, and that multimodal models represent the first real step toward machines that can perceive and simulate the physical world.
I talked about how equations are more powerful than sentences, how simulation is the real intelligence, and how the transition from text to structure is the most important shift happening in AI right now.
I meant every word of that, and I am not walking any of it back, but I realized after publishing it that I left something important on the table, something that has been sitting in my head for years and that I need to say clearly before I can move on.
The thing I left out is the reason why mathematical equations are special in a way that goes far beyond what most people in the AI conversation understand.
Most people think of equations as formulas you memorize in school, abstract things that live on chalkboards and have no connection to real life.
That is completely wrong, and the fact that so many people believe it is one of the biggest intellectual failures of modern education.
Mathematical equations are not abstract decorations.
They are the most compressed, most general, most powerful representations of reality that humans have ever discovered, and they are multimodal by default, meaning they can generate text, images, motion, sound, and physical predictions all from the same compact structure.
That is the argument I am going to make in this post, and I am going to make it so thoroughly that by the end, you will either agree with me or you will have to explain exactly where my reasoning breaks down.
I have been building toward this idea across several posts now, and I want to connect the threads so that people who have been following along can see how everything fits together.
In Language is Limited.
ASI is Impossible., I argued that words are not thoughts, that the brain is not a text machine, and that any system built purely on language inherits the permanent gap between symbols and reality.
In An Empty Life Filled With Constant Suffering, I talked about how words cannot fully capture what I feel, how language always falls short of the real thing inside my head, and how that frustration has shaped everything I think about intelligence.
In As Engineers, LLMs should pay us for tokens usage, I argued that the current system exploits the very people who make it work, and that the value flows upward while the cost flows downward.
And in Technology Has Destroyed My Livelihood, I described how the tech industry destroyed my career while I was doing everything right, and how the promise of equal opportunity turned out to be a lie wrapped in marketing.
All of those posts are pieces of the same puzzle, and this post is the piece that ties them together, because the central claim here is that if we want machines that actually understand reality instead of just talking about it, then mathematical equations are the right foundation, and they have been sitting right in front of us the whole time.
Why I Think About Equations Differently Than Most People I did not grow up thinking about equations.
I grew up in a poor village with no internet, no computer, and no cell phone, as I described in my first post, and the idea that mathematics could be beautiful or powerful was not something anyone around me ever talked about.
Mathematics in school was memorization, repetition, and punishment for getting the wrong answer, and by the time I was a teenager, I had learned to associate equations with stress rather than