5 ms·

LLM's now can capture intent. I think the issue now is that the full landscape of human values never resolves cleanly when mapped from the things we state in wr

LLM's now can capture intent. I think the issue now is that the full landscape of human values never resolves cleanly when mapped from the things we state in writing as being human values. Asimov tried to capture this too, as in, if a robot was tasked with "always protect human life", would it necessarily avoid killing at all costs? What if killing someone would save the lives of 2 others? The infinite array of micro-trolly problems that dot the ethical landscape of actions tractable (and intractable) to literate humans makes a full-consistent accounting of human values impossible, thus could never be expected from a robot with full satisfaction.

dijit 6mo ago
“LLMs can capture intent now” reads to me the same as: AI has emotions now, my AI girlfriend told me so. I don’t discredit you as a person or a professional, but we meatbags are looking for sentience in things which don’t have it, thats why we anthropomorphise things constantly, even as children. We are easily fooled and misled.
- atleastoptimal 6mo ago
  LLM's capturing intent is a capabilities-level discussion, it is verifiable, and is clear just via a conversation with Claude or Chatgpt. Whether they have emotions, an internal life or whatever is an unfalsifiable claim and has nothing to do with capabilities. I'm not sure why you think the claim that they can capture intent implies they have emotions, it's simply a matter of semantic comprehension which is tied to pattern recognition, rhetorical inference, etc that are all naturally comprehensible to a language model.
  - quirkot 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - tvink 6mo ago
    If it is verifiable, please show us. What if clear to you reeks delusion to me.
    - svnt 6mo ago
      Look at any recent CoT output where the model is trying to infer from an underspecified prompt what the user wants or means. It is generally the first thing they do — try to figure out what did you mean with this prompt. When they can’t infer your intent, good models ask follow-on questions to clarify. I am wondering if this is a semantics issue as this is an established are of research, eg https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10871 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10871
      - batshit_beaver 6mo ago
        Right, and then look at any number of research papers showing that CoT output has limited impact on the end result. We've trained these models to pretend to reason.
        atleastoptimal 6mo ago
        If it's only pretending to reason, then how is it that the CoT output improves performance on every single benchmark/test?
        Eisenstein 6mo ago
        > Right, and then look at any number of research papers showing that CoT output has limited impact on the end result. Which research papers? Do I have to find them? > We've trained these models to pretend to reason. I have no idea why that matters. Can you tell me what the difference is if it looks exactly the same and has the same result?
        Dylan16807 6mo ago
        When they say "pretends to" here they're talking about something quantifiable, that the extra text it outputs for CoT barely feeds back into the decisionmaking at all. In other words it's about as useful as having the LLM make the decision and then "explain" how it got there; the extra output is confabulation. Though I'm not sure how true that claim is...
  - nullsanity 6mo ago
    [dead]
- semiquaver 6mo ago
  What do you think it means to “capture intent” and where do current models fall short on this description? From my perspective the models are pretty good at “understanding” my intent, when it comes to describing a plan or an action I want done but it seems like you might be using a different definition. Tell me, what’s your intent? :)
  - dijit 6mo ago
    [dead]
- svnt 6mo ago
  This lack of understanding is a you problem, not a them problem. Your definitions for these terms are too imprecise.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
Guvante 6mo ago
> LLM's now can capture intent. Humans cannot capture intent so how can AI? It is well established that understanding what someone meant by what they said is not a generally solvable problem, akin to the three body problem. Note of course this doesn't mean you can't get good enough almost all of the time, but it in the context here that isn't good enough. After all the entire Asimov story is about that inability to capture intent in the absolute sense.
bicepjai 6mo ago
> LLM's now can capture intent No they can’t. Here is an example: Ask an llm to write a multi phase plan for a very large multi file diff that it created, with least ambiguity, most continuity across plans; let’s see if it can understand your intent.

dijit 6mo ago

“LLMs can capture intent now” reads to me the same as: AI has emotions now, my AI girlfriend told me so. I don’t discredit you as a person or a professional, but we meatbags are looking for sentience in things which don’t have it, thats why we anthropomorphise things constantly, even as children. We are easily fooled and misled.

atleastoptimal 6mo ago
LLM's capturing intent is a capabilities-level discussion, it is verifiable, and is clear just via a conversation with Claude or Chatgpt. Whether they have emotions, an internal life or whatever is an unfalsifiable claim and has nothing to do with capabilities. I'm not sure why you think the claim that they can capture intent implies they have emotions, it's simply a matter of semantic comprehension which is tied to pattern recognition, rhetorical inference, etc that are all naturally comprehensible to a language model.
- quirkot 6mo ago
  [dead]
- tvink 6mo ago
  If it is verifiable, please show us. What if clear to you reeks delusion to me.
  - svnt 6mo ago
    Look at any recent CoT output where the model is trying to infer from an underspecified prompt what the user wants or means. It is generally the first thing they do — try to figure out what did you mean with this prompt. When they can’t infer your intent, good models ask follow-on questions to clarify. I am wondering if this is a semantics issue as this is an established are of research, eg https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10871 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10871
    - batshit_beaver 6mo ago
      Right, and then look at any number of research papers showing that CoT output has limited impact on the end result. We've trained these models to pretend to reason.
      - atleastoptimal 6mo ago
        If it's only pretending to reason, then how is it that the CoT output improves performance on every single benchmark/test?
      - Eisenstein 6mo ago
        > Right, and then look at any number of research papers showing that CoT output has limited impact on the end result. Which research papers? Do I have to find them? > We've trained these models to pretend to reason. I have no idea why that matters. Can you tell me what the difference is if it looks exactly the same and has the same result?
        Dylan16807 6mo ago
        When they say "pretends to" here they're talking about something quantifiable, that the extra text it outputs for CoT barely feeds back into the decisionmaking at all. In other words it's about as useful as having the LLM make the decision and then "explain" how it got there; the extra output is confabulation. Though I'm not sure how true that claim is...
- nullsanity 6mo ago
  [dead]
semiquaver 6mo ago
What do you think it means to “capture intent” and where do current models fall short on this description? From my perspective the models are pretty good at “understanding” my intent, when it comes to describing a plan or an action I want done but it seems like you might be using a different definition. Tell me, what’s your intent? :)
- dijit 6mo ago
  [dead]
svnt 6mo ago
This lack of understanding is a you problem, not a them problem. Your definitions for these terms are too imprecise.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

Guvante 6mo ago

> LLM's now can capture intent. Humans cannot capture intent so how can AI? It is well established that understanding what someone meant by what they said is not a generally solvable problem, akin to the three body problem. Note of course this doesn't mean you can't get good enough almost all of the time, but it in the context here that isn't good enough. After all the entire Asimov story is about that inability to capture intent in the absolute sense.

bicepjai 6mo ago

> LLM's now can capture intent No they can’t. Here is an example: Ask an llm to write a multi phase plan for a very large multi file diff that it created, with least ambiguity, most continuity across plans; let’s see if it can understand your intent.