3 ms·
The field of AI likes to borrow pop psychology/philosophy language and use it for its own narrow jargon. It's been doing that for almost a century now. That's h
by swatcoder 2y ago
The field of AI likes to borrow pop psychology/philosophy language and use it for its own narrow jargon. It's been doing that for almost a century now. That's how it builds enthusiasm and raises funds, and also how it shoots itself in the foot and invites the AI winters that hollow it out again.
The field named itself that very way to in response to a early 20th century boom of interest (money) in "intelligence" as something quantifiable (and therefore potentially computable). Tons of money was flying around based on the idea that people could be quantitatively measured for work-suitability, and researchers in computation saw opportunity to get research funds to explore that in their own budding endeavor, so they adopted the language and made a very long bet that they might eventually figure it out.
At this point, there is largely consensus within the field that current models perform a process that the the field has collectively decided to call "reasoning" as part of their tradition of repurposing psychology and philosophy language as jargon.
There's no putting that cat back in the bag. It's a term of art within the field now. Frustratingly, it's easier to just accept that this is just a novel sense of the word than to try to reconcile it with senses that we might be familiar with from lay usage or from other fields.
- d4mi3n 2y agoI find it apropos that this topic (disagreement about if LLMs can "reason") boils down to being an issue of one of the hard problems in computer science: naming things.
- ben_w 2y agoAnd the linked topic, off by one errors. One could also the hallucinated citations are null pointers. At least cache invalidation is easier: the users can backtrack up a conversation as far as they need to in order to un-cache things from the context window.
- astrange 2y ago> The field of AI likes to borrow pop psychology/philosophy language and use it for its own narrow jargon. They also like to invent metaphors for how the brain works, and then forget that it's a metaphor and decide that humans either literally have one, that they should program one into AIs, or that AIs must have invented one on their own. This is why you keep seeing them talk about "world models", which probably don't actually exist and which people don't actually need in order to live their life.
- fragmede 2y agoI agree that some of the talk about neurons in LLMs can be a bit much, but don't you have a model in your head of how the world is composed of forces, and you can generally predict how things react? If you throw a ball up in the air, will it come down or just go up forever? Or are we using different definitions for "world model"?
- astrange 2y agoI think the words "a" and "model" in "a world model" are both bad. People do that sometimes (for instance I was at the Ren Faire recently and aimed the bow when I tried archery), but people are limited by time and calories so must be energy-efficient, which means they can't afford to spend effort making a model that isn't necessary. And what's necessary is very specific to the task or context you're in. For instance, you don't need to know what's in the garbage to throw it out. But you do need to know what's in the recycling to put it in the right bin.