4 ms·
I really wish it was called chain of instruction. Because it's definitely not thought.
by _superposition_ 1mo ago
I really wish it was called chain of instruction. Because it's definitely not thought.
- Angostura 1mo agoChain Of Tokens
- arm32 1mo agoThey’re intermediate tokens, so I wish we called it what it is… ITG. The anthropomorphizing is out of control.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 1mo agoThe anthropomorphizing is part of the marketing. They'll never let up on it.
- mcbuilder 1mo agoI mean CoT came out of research circles not marketing
- GPerson 1mo agoResearch is salesmanship.
- cwillu 1mo agoIt's impossible to tell the “it's all marketing!!11oneone” folks anything.
- _superposition_ 1mo agoI don't disagree. I remember the days of "think step by step". Plenty of people were doing it before the paper. Just a guess but that's where the title came from. Regardless, marketing wise they stepped in shit.
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- _superposition_ 1mo agoNailed it
- ahofmann 1mo agoEverything around LLMs is blatantly misleading. There is no thought, there is no personality in those programs. I really despise how those tools are trained to sound like a person, or appearing as honest. The worst offender are the AI voices with their fake pauses, breathes and so on, which sound so convincing, while talking just false, sycophancy bullshit.
- spilldahill 1mo ago[flagged]
- popupeyecare 1mo agoMaybe thoughts are just a chain of instructions in our head.
- mgraczyk 1mo agothis is needlessly pedantic first, they are certainly not instructions so that is a much worse name but more importantly, we use words in new contexts all the time. Do you object to calling the computer device "mouse" because it's not a mouse? how about "neural network"? "ignition" on an electric vehicle? "cot" is no more misleading than thousands of words you use every day.
- _superposition_ 1mo agoAnthropomorphizing is not pedantic, especially in a technical domain. I get the paper title and all, but at this point it's marketing.
- parineum 1mo agoThey are instructions. Everything in the context is instructions for the next token. The "thought" guides the answer by providing clearer instructions.
- lossolo 1mo agoYeah, basically they are using more computation to explore the solution space before producing the final answer.
- minimaxir 1mo ago"Chain of Thoughts" is a term from the title of a 2022 research paper "Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903), well before ChatGPT and the subsequent marketing hype. If anything, it's the most correct way to use the term.
- bertmuir 1mo agoThe term is an anthropomorphised pseudoexplanation for what it actually refers to. It's akin to calling genetic mutation "the forces of evolution", or price negotiation "the invisible hand of the market". We do that sort of thing when we don't know what the thing we're trying to describe is and have nothing better - a contemporary example of an appropriate use of this would be "dark matter". But we do know what this is. It's "instruction steps". Not a series of thoughts! Can we please aim higher than Victorian-era allegory and metaphors. If we don't, we'll keep getting people saying stuff like "GPT-6 is better at hiding its thoughts".
- _superposition_ 1mo agoI truly appreciate your depth of insight on the matter. Like I said elsewhere marketing stepped in shit and it's gonna stick.
- bertmuir 28d agoMarketing didn't do this, as pointed out earlier, it's the ML academics and researchers coining these unscientific terms and explanations. I'd expect it in social sciences - where functionalist explanation are often appropriate, but its easy to step over the margin into metaphor and personification. But not computer sciences - where it's obviously absurd. These professionals should know better.
- fooker 1mo agoWhat is thought?
- _superposition_ 1mo agoGreat question. I suspect it's more than tokens.
- fooker 1mo agoThing you can only suspect and not define are usually open to interpretation :)
- _superposition_ 1mo agoAs with everything in the human experience.
- fooker 1mo agoRight, anthropomorphizing AI is a 'human experience' too. Most people just feel better treating AI as a conscious thing that 'thinks'. As a coworker or whatever. Plenty of people seem to be using AI as some sort of therapy, and it's just nasty to force them not to do so. Your human experience can, surely, be different but understand that others can dismiss it just as easily as you dismiss theirs.
- _superposition_ 1mo agoCasually found this quote from Einstein, and personally it hits the nail on the head. "The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others."
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]