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This falls apart at claim 1, because it's for a token, not the answer. You can start a reasoning process, but I don't know of anyone seriously claiming it happe
by viraptor 2y ago
This falls apart at claim 1, because it's for a token, not the answer. You can start a reasoning process, but I don't know of anyone seriously claiming it happens in a single step.
LLMs have a fixed budget per token, but the result you normally want is multiple tokens long. Engaging in chain-of-thought answer means a variable number of tokens, with the length depending on the complexity of the task. In this thread I mentioned the prompt + generated subtasks, so it's not like we're talking about single-token outputs.
Or in a simple example, the answer to "using step by step reasoning, what's the colour of a white sheet" is significantly shorter than "using step by step reasoning, why is Chewbacca defence a fallacy". The more complex task automatically got more steps and more tokens dedicated to it.
> Humans do not have a fixed computation budget per token.
That's not even wrong. Humans don't operate on tokens. That just doesn't make sense.
- mjburgess 2y agoAt least two strategies of reply: 1) choose problems P1..n such that they have yes/no answers; 2) rephrase my argument to consider max-tokens given any prompt. But I think you could see these yourself, so I'm at a loss as to what the purpose of this game is. What is the motivation to insist that animal cognition consists of some process similar to compressing 1PB of books into frequency associations and computing a conditional probability? Is it some desire to believe one hasnt been duped by the technology? "No no, I am no fool, it really is real!" etc. ? Or wishfullfilment of some other sort? Or just the cynical view that if one is nihilistic about people one is most likely right? (Each, of course, a pseudoscience of its own sort).