6 ms·

This seems fairly obvious at this point. If they were actually reasoning at all they'd be capable (even if not good) of complex games like chess Instead they'r

This seems fairly obvious at this point. If they were actually reasoning at all they'd be capable (even if not good) of complex games like chess Instead they're barely able to eek out wins against a bot that plays completely random moves: https://maxim-saplin.github.io/llm_chess/ https://maxim-saplin.github.io/llm_chess/

kylebyte 2y ago
Every day I am more convinced that LLM hype is the equivalent of someone seeing a stage magician levitate a table across the stage and assuming this means hovercars must only be a few years away.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  I believe there's a widespread confusion between a fictional character that is described as a AI assistant, versus the actual algorithm building the play-story which humans imagine the character from. An illusion actively promoted by companies seeking investment and hype. AcmeAssistant is "helpful" and "clever" in the same way that Vampire Count Dracula is "brooding" and "immortal".
famouswaffles 2y ago
LLMs are capable of playing chess and 3.5 turbo instruct does so quite well (for a human) at 1800 ELO. Does this mean they can truly reason now ? https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval
- hatefulmoron 2y ago
  3.5 turbo instruct is a huge outlier. https://dynomight.substack.com/p/chess https://dynomight.substack.com/p/chess Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138289
  - famouswaffles 2y ago
    That might be overstating it, at least if you mean it to be some unreplicable feat. Small models have been trained that play around 1200 to 1300 on the eleuther discord. And there's this grandmaster level transformer - https://arxiv.org/html/2402.04494v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2402.04494v1 Open AI, Anthropic and the like simply don't care much about their LLMs playing chess. That or post training is messing things up.
    - hatefulmoron 2y ago
      > That might be overstating it, at least if you mean it to be some unreplicable feat. I mean, surely there's a reason you decided to mention 3.5 turbo instruct and not.. 3.5 turbo? Or any other model? Even the ones that came after? It's clearly a big outlier, at least when you consider "LLMs" to be a wide selection of recent models. If you're saying that LLMs/transformer models are capable of being trained to play chess by training on chess data, I agree with you. I think AstroBen was pointing out that LLMs, despite having the ability to solve some very impressive mathematics and programming tasks, don't seem to generalize their reasoning abilities to a domain like chess. That's surprising, isn't it?
      - famouswaffles 2y ago
        I mentioned it because it's the best example. One example is enough to disprove the "not capable of". There are other examples too. >I think AstroBen was pointing out that LLMs, despite having the ability to solve some very impressive mathematics and programming tasks, don't seem to generalize their reasoning abilities to a domain like chess. That's surprising, isn't it? Not really. The LLMs play chess like they have no clue what the rules of the game are, not like poor reasoners. Trying to predict and failing is how they learn anything. If you want them to learn a game like chess then how you get them to learn it - by trying to predict chess moves. Chess books during training only teach them how to converse about chess.
        hatefulmoron 2y ago
- AstroBen 2y ago
  My point wasn't chess specific or that they couldn't have specific training for it. It was a more general "here is something that LLMs clearly aren't being trained for currently, but would also be solvable through reasoning skills" Much in the same way a human who only just learnt the rules but 0 strategy would very, very rarely lose here These companies are shouting that their products are passing incredibly hard exams, solving PHD level questions, and are about to displace humans, and yet they still fail to crush a random-only strategy chess bot? How does this make any sense? We're on the verge of AGI but there's not even the tiniest spark of general reasoning ability in something they haven't been trained for "Reasoning" or "Thinking" are marketing terms and nothing more. If an LLM is trained for chess then its performance would just come from memorization, not any kind of "reasoning"
  - famouswaffles 2y ago
    >If an LLM is trained for chess then its performance would just come from memorization, not any kind of "reasoning". If you think you can play chess at that level over that many games and moves with memorization then i don't know what to tell you except that you're wrong. It's not possible so let's just get that out of the way. >These companies are shouting that their products are passing incredibly hard exams, solving PHD level questions, and are about to displace humans, and yet they still fail to crush a random-only strategy chess bot? How does this make any sense? Why doesn't it ? Have you actually looked at any of these games ? Those LLMs aren't playing like poor reasoners. They're playing like machines who have no clue what the rules of the game are. LLMs learn by predicting and failing and getting a little better at it, repeat ad nauseum. You want them to learn the rules of a complex game ? That's how you do it. By training them to predict it. Training on chess books just makes them learn how to converse about chess. Humans have weird failure modes that are odds with their 'intelligence'. We just choose to call them funny names and laugh about it sometimes. These Machines have theirs. That's all there is to it. The top comment we are both replying to had gemini-2.5-pro which released less than 5 days later hit 25% on the benchmark. Now that was particularly funny.
    - AstroBen 2y ago
      > Why doesn't it? It was surprising to me because I would have expected if there was reasoning ability then it would translate across domains at least somewhat, but yeah what you say makes sense. I'm thinking of it in human terms
gilleain 2y ago
Just in case it wasn't a typo, and you happen not to know ... that word is probably "eke" - meaning gaining (increasing, enlarging from wiktionary) - rather than "eek" which is what mice do :)
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Ick, OK, ACK.
- AstroBen 2y ago
  hah you're right on the spelling but wrong on my meaning. That's probably the first time I've typed it. I don't think LLMs are quite at the level of mice reasoning yet! https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/eke-out https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/eke-o... to obtain or win something only with difficulty or great effort
raylad 2y ago
Eek! You mean eke.

kylebyte 2y ago

Every day I am more convinced that LLM hype is the equivalent of someone seeing a stage magician levitate a table across the stage and assuming this means hovercars must only be a few years away.

Terr_ 2y ago
I believe there's a widespread confusion between a fictional character that is described as a AI assistant, versus the actual algorithm building the play-story which humans imagine the character from. An illusion actively promoted by companies seeking investment and hype. AcmeAssistant is "helpful" and "clever" in the same way that Vampire Count Dracula is "brooding" and "immortal".

famouswaffles 2y ago

LLMs are capable of playing chess and 3.5 turbo instruct does so quite well (for a human) at 1800 ELO. Does this mean they can truly reason now ? https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval

hatefulmoron 2y ago
3.5 turbo instruct is a huge outlier. https://dynomight.substack.com/p/chess https://dynomight.substack.com/p/chess Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138289
- famouswaffles 2y ago
  That might be overstating it, at least if you mean it to be some unreplicable feat. Small models have been trained that play around 1200 to 1300 on the eleuther discord. And there's this grandmaster level transformer - https://arxiv.org/html/2402.04494v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2402.04494v1 Open AI, Anthropic and the like simply don't care much about their LLMs playing chess. That or post training is messing things up.
  - hatefulmoron 2y ago
    > That might be overstating it, at least if you mean it to be some unreplicable feat. I mean, surely there's a reason you decided to mention 3.5 turbo instruct and not.. 3.5 turbo? Or any other model? Even the ones that came after? It's clearly a big outlier, at least when you consider "LLMs" to be a wide selection of recent models. If you're saying that LLMs/transformer models are capable of being trained to play chess by training on chess data, I agree with you. I think AstroBen was pointing out that LLMs, despite having the ability to solve some very impressive mathematics and programming tasks, don't seem to generalize their reasoning abilities to a domain like chess. That's surprising, isn't it?
    - famouswaffles 2y ago
      I mentioned it because it's the best example. One example is enough to disprove the "not capable of". There are other examples too. >I think AstroBen was pointing out that LLMs, despite having the ability to solve some very impressive mathematics and programming tasks, don't seem to generalize their reasoning abilities to a domain like chess. That's surprising, isn't it? Not really. The LLMs play chess like they have no clue what the rules of the game are, not like poor reasoners. Trying to predict and failing is how they learn anything. If you want them to learn a game like chess then how you get them to learn it - by trying to predict chess moves. Chess books during training only teach them how to converse about chess.
      - hatefulmoron 2y ago
AstroBen 2y ago
My point wasn't chess specific or that they couldn't have specific training for it. It was a more general "here is something that LLMs clearly aren't being trained for currently, but would also be solvable through reasoning skills" Much in the same way a human who only just learnt the rules but 0 strategy would very, very rarely lose here These companies are shouting that their products are passing incredibly hard exams, solving PHD level questions, and are about to displace humans, and yet they still fail to crush a random-only strategy chess bot? How does this make any sense? We're on the verge of AGI but there's not even the tiniest spark of general reasoning ability in something they haven't been trained for "Reasoning" or "Thinking" are marketing terms and nothing more. If an LLM is trained for chess then its performance would just come from memorization, not any kind of "reasoning"
- famouswaffles 2y ago
  >If an LLM is trained for chess then its performance would just come from memorization, not any kind of "reasoning". If you think you can play chess at that level over that many games and moves with memorization then i don't know what to tell you except that you're wrong. It's not possible so let's just get that out of the way. >These companies are shouting that their products are passing incredibly hard exams, solving PHD level questions, and are about to displace humans, and yet they still fail to crush a random-only strategy chess bot? How does this make any sense? Why doesn't it ? Have you actually looked at any of these games ? Those LLMs aren't playing like poor reasoners. They're playing like machines who have no clue what the rules of the game are. LLMs learn by predicting and failing and getting a little better at it, repeat ad nauseum. You want them to learn the rules of a complex game ? That's how you do it. By training them to predict it. Training on chess books just makes them learn how to converse about chess. Humans have weird failure modes that are odds with their 'intelligence'. We just choose to call them funny names and laugh about it sometimes. These Machines have theirs. That's all there is to it. The top comment we are both replying to had gemini-2.5-pro which released less than 5 days later hit 25% on the benchmark. Now that was particularly funny.
  - AstroBen 2y ago
    > Why doesn't it? It was surprising to me because I would have expected if there was reasoning ability then it would translate across domains at least somewhat, but yeah what you say makes sense. I'm thinking of it in human terms

gilleain 2y ago

Just in case it wasn't a typo, and you happen not to know ... that word is probably "eke" - meaning gaining (increasing, enlarging from wiktionary) - rather than "eek" which is what mice do :)

Terr_ 2y ago
Ick, OK, ACK.
AstroBen 2y ago
hah you're right on the spelling but wrong on my meaning. That's probably the first time I've typed it. I don't think LLMs are quite at the level of mice reasoning yet! https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/eke-out https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/eke-o... to obtain or win something only with difficulty or great effort

raylad 2y ago

Eek! You mean eke.