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> It helps to know that LLMs don’t “reason”. They predict .. Semantics. Prediction is the training objective. The ability to reason can be, and very arguably i
by theteapot 2mo ago
> It helps to know that LLMs don’t “reason”. They predict ..
Semantics. Prediction is the training objective. The ability to reason can be, and very arguably is, an emergent property of that.
- jayd16 2mo agoEven if that was true, you'd have to still prove it has emerged.
- krackers 2mo agoWhat would be your test to determine that?
- slopinthebag 2mo agoWhy would "reasoning" be an emergent property of prediction?
- hsn915 2mo agoHow do you predict without reasoning?
- slopinthebag 2mo agoWhere is the reasoning in linear regression?
- danielbln 2mo agoWhere is the reasoning in synaptic transmission?
- necovek 2mo agoThere isn't, which is exactly the point: we do not yet understand the fundamentals behind reasoning.
- anon48293 2mo agoDon’t we? We can build something which has all the output associated with reasoning. I’d say we’ve figured out the fundamentals behind reasoning.
- chrisjj 2mo ago> We can build something which has all the output associated with reasoning. Sure. A photocopier fed with a maths paper.
- anon48293 2mo agoI’m willing to bet it still proved more novel mathematical theorems than you did. What does this say about your reasoning?
- slopinthebag 2mo agoExcavator can dig a ditch better than I can, thus it must be more capable than me in every physical dimension.
- anon48293 2mo agoNo. But it is a better digger, and it can in fact dig, evident by the fact that it digs. It doesn’t merely simulate digging just because it’s a machine.
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- slopinthebag 2mo agoFirst of all this isn't true. We cannot yet build something which has all the output associated with reasoning. But secondary to that, symbols != semantics. If I had a magical machine which could appear from the outside to be reasoning, but upon closer introspection was simply simulating reasoning, by definition it would not be reasoning. And yet that is the criterion you seem to think indicates reasoning ability. So it's not a sufficient criterion. Claiming we've figured out the fundamentals behind reasoning is hopelessly naive.
- slopinthebag 2mo agoThis is just pure unbridled reductionism. "Show me a single atom in the human body that is 'alive'. You can't? Therefore we're all zombies...." Reasoning is an emergent property of complex systems. Prediction is not. Thus you cannot claim reasoning drives prediction.
- danielbln 2mo agoWhy can't an emergent capability arise in service of a predictive objective?
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- slopinthebag 2mo agoHow would it?
- hsn915 1mo agoYour comment was reductionist > Where is the reasoning in linear regression? The comment you are replying to was meant to expose you to your own reductionism.
- koningrobot 2mo ago"This much of x0, and this much of x1, and this much of x2, therefore it's that much of y"
- chrisjj 2mo agoFlip a coin.
- mw888 2mo agoPredict multiple outcomes, induct across them, refine.
- js8 2mo agoThere's a lot of reasoning in the training data.
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- hbcdbff 2mo agoWhy wouldn’t it?
- complex_pi 2mo agoMaybe it looks like reasoning, and maybe that's enough for some.
- TheWrongGuy 2mo agoBy that standard, human brains don't either. Our externalizations of concepts like language or symbolic structure allow us to do so. In the parlance of our times, we built our own reasoning harnesses because our intuition lead us to do so.
- antonvs 2mo ago> By that standard, human brains don't either. Exactly. If LLMs don’t reason, then neither do humans. Functionally, we can analyze LLM output and point to examples of reasoning, and examples that imply understanding. The problem is there’s a lot of superstition around words like reasoning and understanding. People imagine some ineffable quality that only humans possess that distinguish what they do from what models can do, but they can’t define it - most likely, because it doesn’t exist.
- TheWrongGuy 2mo agoI'm in the really annoying and lonely (not necessarily in that order) camp of people who think it probably does exist but isn't properly described by these specious and lazy arguments.
- AndyMcConachie 2mo agoNo. You're simply wrong.
- nsingh2 2mo agoI've never found these discussions to be all that useful, because it's hard to define what conditions are sufficient to say something is "thinking" or "reasoning". It just ends up being circular and metaphysical arguments. That being said, current generation LLMs do have issue, it's more productive to talk about those and their impact on real tasks (long term memory, continual learning, tokenization, context rot, reversal curse, etc)
- theteapot 2mo agoAKA semantics.