LLMs can’t reason — they just crib reasoning-like steps from their training data : techtakes

[+] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

meant for the stubsack?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (9 children)

"sigh"

(Preface: I work in AI)

This isn't news. We've known this for many, many years. It's one of the reasons why many companies didn't bother using LLM's in the first place, that paired with the sheer amount of hallucinations you'll get that'll often utterly destroy a company's reputation (lol Google).

With that said, for commercial services that use LLM's, it's absolutely not true. The models won't reason, but many will have separate expert agents or API endpoints that it will be told to use to disambiguate or better understand what is being asked, what context is needed, etc.

It's kinda funny, because many AI bros rave about how LLM's are getting super powerful, when in reality the real improvements we're seeing is in smaller models that teach a LLM about things like Personas, where to seek expert opinion, what a user "might" mean if they misspell something or ask for something out of context, etc. The LLM's themselves are only slightly getting better, but the thing that preceded them is propping them up to make them better

IMO, LLM's are what they are, a good way to spit information out fast. They're an orchestration mechanism at best. When you think about them this way, every improvement we see tends to make a lot of sense. The article is kinda true, but not in the way they want it to be.

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[+] [email protected] -10 points 3 weeks ago (14 children)

When you ask an LLM a reasoning question. You're not expecting it to think for you, you're expecting that it has crawled multiple people asking semantically the same question and getting semantically the same answer, from other people, that are now encoded in its vectors.

That's why you can ask it. because it encodes semantics.

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[+] [email protected] -11 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

What if I told you 90% of humans do that.

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[+] [email protected] -14 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

People keep saying this, but I'm not convinced our own brains are doing anything more.

[+] [email protected] -15 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (23 children)

Let the haters hate.

Despite the welcome growth of atheism, almost all humans at one level or another cling to the idea that our monkey brains are filled with some magic miraculous light that couldn't possibly be replicated. The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script, whether due to individual capacity, or a civilization that largely doesn't reward metacognition or pondering the questions that matter, as that doesn't immediately feed individual productivity or make anyone materially wealthier, that maze doesn't lead to any yummy cheese for us.

AI development isn't finally progressing quickly and making people uncomfortable with its capability because it's catching up to our supposedly transcendental superbrains (that en masse spent hundreds of thousands of years wandering around in the dirt before it finally occurred to any of them that we could grow food seasonally in one place). It's making a lot of humans uncomfortable because it's demonstrating that there isn't a whole hell of a lot to catch up to, especially for an average human.

There's a reason pretty much everyone immediately discarded the Turing Test and basically called it a bullshit metric after elevating it for decades as a major benchmark in the development of AI systems... The moment a technology and design that could readily pass it became available. That's the blind hubris of man on grand display.

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