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No matter how much budget you give to an LLM to perform “reasoning” it is simply sampling tokens from a probability distribution. There is no “thinking” there;
by whakim 2y ago
No matter how much budget you give to an LLM to perform “reasoning” it is simply sampling tokens from a probability distribution. There is no “thinking” there; anything that approximates thinking is a post-hoc outcome of this statistical process as opposed to a precursor to it. That being said, it still isn’t clear to me how much difference this makes in practice.
- tim333 2y agoYou could similarly say humans can't perform reasoning because it's just neurons sampling electrochemical impulses.
- whakim 2y agoI think it’s pretty clear that the comparison doesn’t hold if you interrogate it. It seems to me, at least, that humans are not only functions that act as processors of sense-data; that there does exist the inner life that the author discusses.
- southernplaces7 2y agoThis argument gets trotted out frequently here when it comes to LLM discussions and it strikes me as absurd specifically because all of us, as humans, from the very dumbest to the brilliant, have inner lives of self-directed reasoning. We individually know that we have these because we feel them within ourselves and a great body of evidence indicates that they exist and drive our conduct. LLMs can simulate discourse and certain activities that look similar, but by definition of their design, no evidence at all exists that they possess the same inner reasoning as a human. Why does someone need to explain to another human that no, we are not just neurons sampling impulses or algorithms pattern-matching tokens together? It's self evident that something more occurs. It's tedious to keep seeing such reductionist nonsense from people who should be more intelligent than to argue it.