5 ms·
LLMs aren't people. They don't reason. They're token generators, a black box. Your analogy falls on its face with any scrutiny.
by b40d-48b2-979e 5mo ago
LLMs aren't people. They don't reason. They're token generators, a black box. Your analogy falls on its face with any scrutiny.
- jatora 5mo agoit's an analogy, it didnt fall on its face at all. it's just a comparison to highlight the point being made was nonsensical. example: you're just a next action generator controlled by trillions of cells and subconscious dna-based behavior. a black box.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoReductio ad absurdum.
- jatora 5mo agoexactly my point lol
- svieira 5mo ago> you're just a next action generator controlled by trillions of cells and subconscious dna-based behavior. With moral agency and the ability to learn (even if we presume you are correct, which I don't think you are).
- jatora 5mo agomoral agency and the ability to learn are implicit in the description you quoted. this isn't some special superpower, all animals have the ability to learn, and many have moral agency. these aren't human specific traits
- CrazyStat 5mo agoI didn’t claim that LLMs are people or that they reason. If the behavior of the llm is the same as the behavior of reasonable people then the behavior of the llm is reasonable, regardless of how black of a box they generate tokens out of. Reasonable people will generate divergent specs for the same prompt. Thus it is reasonable for an LLM to generate divergent specs out of the same prompt. Edit: I use “reasonable” here in the legal sense of the “reasonable person” standard, not to imply any reasoning process.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo ago[flagged]
- CrazyStat 5mo agoPlease point to where in my initial comment I indicated that LLMs are human or reason. If you are unable to do so please withdraw your accusation of gaslighting, a serious form of psychological abuse, and apologize.
- dnautics 5mo agoLLMs do reason (they just sometimes don't reason well). I assure you I've met many devs and "engineers" that reason less than LLMs, and are black boxes, especially in terms of the code they write.
- claytongulick 5mo ago> LLMs do reason No, they don't. They are token predictors that use statistical techniques to emit the randomly weighted next most likely token given the previous token list. The result is a strange mimic of human reasoning, because the tokens it predicts are trained on strings that were produced by humans that were reasoning, but that's not the same thing. Human cognition is complex and poorly understood, and the nature of the mind is an area of study almost as old as consciousness itself. We don't know exactly how it works, or what its exact relationship to the brain is, but we do know that it is not a simple token predictor. LLMs, by their very nature are constrained to the concept of language and the relationship between existing words in a corpus. This is a box they can not escape. Modern neuroscience suggests that the human brain is much more vast than that, and in many ways looks like it is constrained by language, but certainly not limited to it.
- dnautics 5mo agoYou have moved goalposts from reasoning to "human cognition". I won't tolerate that sort of slippery wordplay. Reasoning is making analogies between logical patterns found in conceptual space, with a direction of time (statements precede conclusions). For example. A => B and B => C. You may now deduce A => C. For something fuzzier, A~D and B~E, you may now deduce that D~=>E. This is the sort of thing that higher layer attention mechanism is capable of doing. > This is a box they can not escape. Would you say that Helen Keller was less capable of abstract reasoning because she had more constrained access to sensory input?
- NobleLie 5mo agoThe problem with that is LLMs can output words or symbols that seen like it used "reason" to produce. But for everything the core algorithm does, it's simply nothing like the wetware reasoning to get to the same answer. So he didn't move goalposts. He always meant the reasoning that stems from human cognition. Technically if it has that, it'd be singularity no? So basically the premise is they are doing nothing of the sort. Prove any LLM enough and it really does show it has no quarrels contradicting itself or being bossed around. Has no belief / no orientation etc. It's truly mindless but tricks our mind and soul (or whatever) probably.
- Jtarii 5mo agoThey very obviously reason.
- dnautics 5mo agoit's kind of crazy to think that the transformer architecture can't encode some primitive form of reasoning.
- NobleLie 5mo agoIt appears they don't need to reason or be intelligent to be able to produce working solutions for code. But sure let wild and unmonitored? I wrangle my LLMs like the code monkeys they are. They help materialize code and then you need to sculpt it (and test harness of varying sorts) It really can be useful. It's very different from old world programming.
- IshKebab 5mo agoWow, there are still people trying to claim they don't reason. What will they have to do before you'll admit that they can?
- esailija 5mo agoYou are asking the wrong question. It's not about if you can do X which can be faked especially if you are given practically infinite tries and all failures are hidden. The people who want to believe they actually reason just ignore all obvious evidence of contrary and cherry pick the times reasoning was faked well enough. The people who don't want to believe will just take a second to understand how they work and then come up with ways to reveal they were faking all along. Like asking how many letters there are in a word lol. It's only the people who don't want to believe that count because reality is what happens despite of what you believe.
- IshKebab 5mo agoYou seem to believe that something is only "reasoning" if it works in a particular way. That it's not enough for it to observationally display reasoning skills; it has to be using a particular method to do that so it's not "faking" it. Is that correct?
- Jtarii 5mo agoIt will be interesting to see the excuses people come up with when LLMs innevitably start solving millenium prize problems.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoAren’t people pattern matching neural networks as well? Why does being a token generator mean something is unreliable? Further, why does that mean “it doesn’t reason”. Logic can be encoded in language, symbols or code. If I say “all apples are red” -> “all fruit in the bowl are apples” -> “therefor all the fruit are red”. It doesn’t really matter if I understand the logic or what red is or fruit/apples are, the logic is contained in the structure of the syntax. If an LLM can output the conclusion reliably from predictive operations it is able to have the effect of reason and we don’t need to know or care about whether it “understands” the reasoning.
- keeganpoppen 5mo agono, brah, humans are TOTALLY different. just don’t think about it too hard. we are just special.
- keeganpoppen 5mo agowhy do people insist on claiming that they don’t reason, when they clearly, for all intents and purposes, do. you can be vague; you can express your idea a thousand different ways, and you will get a unique blend of <your input bits> x <hidden reasoning layer> => semi-smoothed output. this is like some Searle Chinese Room bullshit that needs to just die. it is beyond clear that llms can interact with abstract concepts in an extremely meaningful way. this is like the “thought leader” version of the stupid-ass “it’s just smart autocomplete” argument. if you think that, it is user error— either a failure of creativity or a failure of perception or both. just because llms are not a panacea and are problematic for society and “overhyped” and whatever does not make it intellectually honest to claim that there is zero reasoning/creativity/cognition within the box.