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Potentially it could have an impact if it omits a high level description before writing the code, although obviously things like "Sure! Happy to help" do not he

Potentially it could have an impact if it omits a high level description before writing the code, although obviously things like "Sure! Happy to help" do not help. In practice I haven't seen it make too much of a difference with GPT. The model can still use comments to express itself. For non coding tasks, adding "Think step by step" makes a huge difference (versus YOLOing a single word reply).

behnamoh 3y ago
> although obviously things like "Sure! Happy to help" do not help. Yes you're right. I'm mostly concerned with the text that actually "computes" something before the actual code begins. Niceties like "sure! happy to help" don't compute anything. CoT indeed works. Now I've seem people take it to the extreme by having tree of thoughts, forest of thoughts, etc. but I'm not sure how much "reasoning" we can extract from a model that is obviously limited in terms of knowledge and intelligence. CoT already gets us to 80% of the way. With some tweaks it can get even better. I've also seen simulation methods where GPT "agents" talk to each other to form better ideas about a subject. But then again, it's like trying to achieve perpetual motion in physics. One can't get more intelligence from a system than one puts in the system.
- kaibee 3y ago
  > But then again, it's like trying to achieve perpetual motion in physics. One can't get more intelligence from a system than one puts in the system. Not necessarily the same thing, as you're still putting in more processing power/checking more possible paths. Its kinda like simulated annealing, sure the system is dumb, but as long as checking if you have a correct answer is cheap, it still narrows down the search space a lot.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    > Its kinda like simulated annealing. Yeah I get that. We assume there's X amount of intelligence in the LLM and try different paths to tap on that potential. The more paths are simulated, the closer we get to the LLM's intelligence asymptote. But then that's it—we can't go any further.

behnamoh 3y ago

> although obviously things like "Sure! Happy to help" do not help. Yes you're right. I'm mostly concerned with the text that actually "computes" something before the actual code begins. Niceties like "sure! happy to help" don't compute anything. CoT indeed works. Now I've seem people take it to the extreme by having tree of thoughts, forest of thoughts, etc. but I'm not sure how much "reasoning" we can extract from a model that is obviously limited in terms of knowledge and intelligence. CoT already gets us to 80% of the way. With some tweaks it can get even better. I've also seen simulation methods where GPT "agents" talk to each other to form better ideas about a subject. But then again, it's like trying to achieve perpetual motion in physics. One can't get more intelligence from a system than one puts in the system.

kaibee 3y ago
> But then again, it's like trying to achieve perpetual motion in physics. One can't get more intelligence from a system than one puts in the system. Not necessarily the same thing, as you're still putting in more processing power/checking more possible paths. Its kinda like simulated annealing, sure the system is dumb, but as long as checking if you have a correct answer is cheap, it still narrows down the search space a lot.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  > Its kinda like simulated annealing. Yeah I get that. We assume there's X amount of intelligence in the LLM and try different paths to tap on that potential. The more paths are simulated, the closer we get to the LLM's intelligence asymptote. But then that's it—we can't go any further.