Technology

WTF does the author think reasoning is

lol is this news? I mean we call it AI, but it’s just LLM and variants it doesn’t think.

Wow it's almost like the computer scientists were saying this from the start but were shouted over by marketing teams.

I see a lot of misunderstandings in the comments 🫤

This is a pretty important finding for researchers, and it's not obvious by any means. This finding is not showing a problem with LLMs' abilities in general. The issue they discovered is specifically for so-called "reasoning models" that iterate on their answer before replying. It might indicate that the training process is not sufficient for true reasoning.

Most reasoning models are not incentivized to think correctly, and are only rewarded based on their final answer. This research might indicate that's a flaw that needs to be corrected before models can actually reason.

No way!

Statistical Language models don't reason?

But OpenAI, robots taking over!

When are people going to realize, in its current state , an LLM is not intelligent. It doesn’t reason. It does not have intuition. It’s a word predictor.

this is so Apple, claiming to invent or discover something "first" 3 years later than the rest of the market

Just fancy Markov chains with the ability to link bigger and bigger token sets. It can only ever kick off processing as a response and can never initiate any line of reasoning. This, along with the fact that its working set of data can never be updated moment-to-moment, means that it would be a physical impossibility for any LLM to achieve any real "reasoning" processes.

You know, despite not really believing LLM "intelligence" works anywhere like real intelligence, I kind of thought maybe being good at recognizing patterns was a way to emulate it to a point...

But that study seems to prove they're still not even good at that. At first I was wondering how hard the puzzles must have been, and then there's a bit about LLM finishing 100 move towers of Hanoï (on which they were trained) and failing 4 move river crossings. Logically, those problems are very similar... Also, failing to apply a step-by-step solution they were given.

I don't think the article summarizes the research paper well. The researchers gave the AI models simple-but-large (which they confusingly called "complex") puzzles. Like Towers of Hanoi but with 25 discs.

The solution to these puzzles is nothing but patterns. You can write code that will solve the Tower puzzle for any size n and the whole program is less than a screen.

The problem the researchers see is that on these long, pattern-based solutions, the models follow a bad path and then just give up long before they hit their limit on tokens. The researchers don't have an answer for why this is, but they suspect that the reasoning doesn't scale.

does ANY model reason at all?

Peak pseudo-science. The burden of evidence is on the grifters who claim "reason". But neither side has any objective definition of what "reason" means. It's pseudo-science against pseudo-science in a fierce battle.

What's hilarious/sad is the response to this article over on reddit's "singularity" sub, in which all the top comments are people who've obviously never got all the way through a research paper in their lives all trashing Apple and claiming their researchers don't understand AI or "reasoning". It's a weird cult.

No shit

Just like me

Why would they "prove" something that's completely obvious?

The burden of proof is on the grifters who have overwhelmingly been making false claims and distorting language for decades.

Most humans don't reason. They just parrot shit too. The design is very human.

NOOOOOOOOO

SHIIIIIIIIIITT

SHEEERRRLOOOOOOCK

Fucking obviously. Until Data's positronic brains becomes reality, AI is not actual intelligence.

AI is not A I. I should make that a tshirt.

stochastic parrots. all of them. just upgraded “soundex” models.

this should be no surprise, of course!

This has been known for years, this is the default assumption of how these models work.

You would have to prove that some kind of actual reasoning capacity has arisen as... some kind of emergent complexity phenomenon.... not the other way around.

Corpos have just marketed/gaslit us/themselves so hard that they apparently forgot this.