LOOK MAA I AM ON FRONT PAGE
Wow it’s almost like the computer scientists were saying this from the start but were shouted over by marketing teams.
And engineers who stood to make a lot of money
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.
Intuition is about the only thing it has. It’s a statistical system. The problem is it doesn’t have logic. We assume because its computer based that it must be more logic oriented but it’s the opposite. That’s the problem. We can’t get it to do logic very well because it basically feels out the next token by something like instinct. In particular it doesn’t mask or disconsider irrelevant information very well if two segments are near each other in embedding space, which doesn’t guarantee relevance. So then the model is just weighing all of this info, relevant or irrelevant to a weighted feeling for the next token.
This is the core problem. People can handle fuzzy topics and discrete topics. But we really struggle to create any system that can do both like we can. Either we create programming logic that is purely discrete or we create statistics that are fuzzy.
Of course this issue of masking out information that is close in embedding space but is irrelevant to a logical premise is something many humans suck at too. But high functioning humans don’t and we can’t get these models to copy that ability. Too many people, sadly many on the left in particular, not only will treat association as always relevant but sometimes as equivalence. RE racism is assoc with nazism is assoc patriarchy is historically related to the origins of capitalism ∴ nazism ≡ capitalism. While national socialism was anti-capitalist. Associative thinking removes nuance. And sadly some people think this way. And they 100% can be replaced by LLMs today, because at least the LLM is mimicking what logic looks like better though still built on blind association. It just has more blind associations and finetune weighting for summing them. More than a human does. So it can carry that to mask as logical further than a human who is on the associative thought train can.
You’d think the M in LLM would give it away.
People think they want AI, but they don’t even know what AI is on a conceptual level.
They want something like the Star Trek computer or one of Tony Stark’s AIs that were basically deus ex machinas for solving some hard problem behind the scenes. Then it can say “model solved” or they can show a test simulation where the ship doesn’t explode (or sometimes a test where it only has an 85% chance of exploding when it used to be 100%, at which point human intuition comes in and saves the day by suddenly being better than the AI again and threads that 15% needle or maybe abducts the captain to go have lizard babies with).
AIs that are smarter than us but for some reason don’t replace or even really join us (Vision being an exception to the 2nd, and Ultron trying to be an exception to the 1st).
They don’t want AI, they want an app.
And that’s pretty damn useful, but obnoxious to have expectations wildly set incorrectly.
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.
When given explicit instructions to follow models failed because they had not seen similar instructions before.
This paper shows that there is no reasoning in LLMs at all, just extended pattern matching.
Yeah these comments have the three hallmarks of Lemmy:
- AI is just autocomplete mantras.
- Apple is always synonymous with bad and dumb.
- Rare pockets of really thoughtful comments.
Thanks for being at least the latter.
What statistical method do you base that claim on? The results presented match expectations given that Markov chains are still the basis of inference. What magic juice is added to “reasoning models” that allow them to break free of the inherent boundaries of the statistical methods they are based on?
I’d encourage you to research more about this space and learn more.
As it is, the statement “Markov chains are still the basis of inference” doesn’t make sense, because markov chains are a separate thing. You might be thinking of Markov decision processes, which is used in training RL agents, but that’s also unrelated because these models are not RL agents, they’re supervised learning agents. And even if they were RL agents, the MDP describes the training environment, not the model itself, so it’s not really used for inference.
I mean this just as an invitation to learn more, and not pushback for raising concerns. Many in the research community would be more than happy to welcome you into it. The world needs more people who are skeptical of AI doing research in this field.
Which method, then, is the inference built upon, if not the embeddings? And the question still stands, how does “AI” escape the inherent limits of statistical inference?
Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter (1979) showed reasoning emerges from pattern recognition and analogy-making - abilities that modern AI demonstrably possesses. The question isn’t if AI can reason, but how its reasoning differs from ours.
lol is this news? I mean we call it AI, but it’s just LLM and variants it doesn’t think.
This is why I say these articles are so similar to how right wing media covers issues about immigrants.
There’s some weird media push to convince the left to hate AI. Think of all the headlines for these issues. There are so many similarities. They’re taking jobs. They are a threat to our way of life. The headlines talk about how they will sexual assault your wife, your children, you. Threats to the environment. There’s articles like this where they take something known as twist it to make it sound nefarious to keep the story alive and avoid decay of interest.
Then when they pass laws, we’re all primed to accept them removing whatever it is that advantageous them and disadvantageous us.
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.
NOOOOOOOOO
SHIIIIIIIIIITT
SHEEERRRLOOOOOOCK
Extept for Siri, right? Lol
Apple Intelligence
Without being explicit with well researched material, then the marketing presentation gets to stand largely unopposed.
So this is good even if most experts in the field consider it an obvious result.
Most humans don’t reason. They just parrot shit too. The design is very human.
LLMs deal with tokens. Essentially, predicting a series of bytes.
Humans do much, much, much, much, much, much, much more than that.
No. They don’t. We just call them proteins.
You are either vastly overestimating the Language part of an LLM or simplifying human physiology back to the Greek’s Four Humours theory.
“They”.
What are you?
Thata why ceo love them. When your job is 90% spewing bs a machine that does that is impressive
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.
It’s an expensive carbon spewing parrot.
It’s a very resource intensive autocomplete
this is so Apple, claiming to invent or discover something “first” 3 years later than the rest of the market
Trust Apple. Everyone else who were in the space first are lying.
hey I cant recognize patterns so theyre smarter than me at least
You assume humans do the opposite? We literally institutionalize humans who not follow set patterns.
We also reward people who can memorize and regurgitate even if they don’t understand what they are doing.
Some of them, sometimes. But some are adulated and free and contribute vast swathes to our culture and understanding.
No shit
WTF does the author think reasoning is
Thank you Captain Obvious! Only those who think LLMs are like “little people in the computer” didn’t knew this already.
Yeah, well there are a ton of people literally falling into psychosis, led by LLMs. So it’s unfortunately not that many people that already knew it.
Dude they made chat gpt a little more boit licky and now many people are convinced they are literal messiahs. All it took for them was a chat bot and a few hours of talk.
Fair, but the same is true of me. I don’t actually “reason”; I just have a set of algorithms memorized by which I propose a pattern that seems like it might match the situation, then a different pattern by which I break the situation down into smaller components and then apply patterns to those components. I keep the process up for a while. If I find a “nasty logic error” pattern match at some point in the process, I “know” I’ve found a “flaw in the argument” or “bug in the design”.
But there’s no from-first-principles method by which I developed all these patterns; it’s just things that have survived the test of time when other patterns have failed me.
I don’t think people are underestimating the power of LLMs to think; I just think people are overestimating the power of humans to do anything other than language prediction and sensory pattern prediction.
You either an llm, or don’t know how your brain works.
This whole era of AI has certainly pushed the brink to existential crisis territory. I think some are even frightened to entertain the prospect that we may not be all that much better than meat machines who on a basic level do pattern matching drawing from the sum total of individual life experience (aka the dataset).
Higher reasoning is taught to humans. We have the capability. That’s why we spend the first quarter of our lives in education. Sometimes not all of us are able.
I’m sure it would certainly make waves if researchers did studies based on whether dumber humans are any different than AI.
