LLMs can reason, and it’s surprising. I think some people get caught up on the “next word prediction” point, because this is just the mechanism. For the next w

LLMs can reason, and it’s surprising. I think some people get caught up on the “next word prediction” point, because this is just the mechanism. For the next word prediction to work, the LLM has all sorts of internal representations of the world inside it which is where the capability comes from. Human reasoning probably comes from evolution (genetic survival/replication), and then somehow thought was an emergent behaviour that unexpectedly came from that process. A thinking machine wasn’t designed, it just kind of came to be over millennia. Seems to be kind of the same with AI, but the first example of these emergent behaviours seems to be coming out of the back of building a next-word-guesser. It’s a little unexpected, but a simple framework seems to be allowing a neural net to somehow build representations of the world inside it. GPT is just a next word guesser, but humans are just big piles of cells trying to replicate and not die.