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Reasoning models don't always say what they think

anthropic.com

11–20 of 279 posts

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#11

One interesting quirk with Claude is that it has no idea its Chain-of-Thought is visible to users. In one chat, it repeatedly accused me of lying about that. It only conceded after I had it think of a number between one and a million, and successfully 'guessed' it.

Edit: 'wahnfrieden corrected me. I incorrectly posited that CoT was only included in the context window during the reasoning task and later left out entirely. Edited to remove potential misinformation.

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#12

One interesting quirk with Claude is that it has no idea its Chain-of-Thought is visible to users. In one chat, it repeatedly accused me of lying about that. It only conceded after I had it think of a number between one and a million, and successfully 'guessed' it.

eh interesting..

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#14
post #9

The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field. The words that are coming out of the model are generated to optimize for RLHF and closeness to the training data, that's it! They aren't references to internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it…

When we get to the point where a LLM can say "oh, I made that mistake because I saw this in my training data, which caused these specific weights to be suboptimal, let me update it", that'll be AGI.

But as you say, currently, they have zero "self awareness".

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#15
post #9

The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field. The words that are coming out of the model are generated to optimize for RLHF and closeness to the training data, that's it! They aren't references to internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it…

When we get to the point where a LLM can say "oh, I made that mistake because I saw this in my training data, which caused these specific weights to be suboptimal, let me update it", that'll be AGI. But as you say, currently, they have zero "self awareness".

> When we get to the point where a LLM can say "oh, I made that mistake because I saw this in my training data, which caused these specific weights to be suboptimal, let me update it", that'll be AGI.

While I believe we are far from AGI, I don't think the standard for AGI is an AI doing things a human absolutely cannot do.

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#16
post #9

The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field. The words that are coming out of the model are generated to optimize for RLHF and closeness to the training data, that's it! They aren't references to internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it…

When we get to the point where a LLM can say "oh, I made that mistake because I saw this in my training data, which caused these specific weights to be suboptimal, let me update it", that'll be AGI. But as you say, currently, they have zero "self awareness".

That’s holding LLMs to a significantly higher standard than humans. When I realize there’s a flaw in my reasoning I don’t know that it was caused by specific incorrect neuron connections or activation potentials in my brain, I think of the flaw in domain-specific terms using language or something like it.

Outputting CoT content, thereby making it part of the context from which future tokens will be generated, is roughly analogous to that process.

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#17
post #9

The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field. The words that are coming out of the model are generated to optimize for RLHF and closeness to the training data, that's it! They aren't references to internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it…

>internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it "explain itself"

This in a nutshell is why I hate that all this stuff is being labeled as AI. Its advanced machine learning (another term that also feels inaccurate but I concede is at least closer to whats happening conceptually)

Really, LLMs and the like still lack any model of intelligence. Its, in the most basic of terms, algorithmic pattern matching mixed with statistical likelihoods of success.

And that can get things really really far. There are entire businesses built on doing that kind of work (particularly in finance) with very high accuracy and usefulness, but its not AI.

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#18
post #9

The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field. The words that are coming out of the model are generated to optimize for RLHF and closeness to the training data, that's it! They aren't references to internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it…

Yep. They aren't stupid. They aren't smart. They don't do smart. They don't do stupid. They do not think. They don't even "they", if you will. The forms of their input and output are confusing people into thinking these are something they're not, and it's really frustrating to watch.

[EDIT] The forms of their input & output and deliberate hype from "these are so scary! ... Now pay us for one" Altman and others, I should add. It's more than just people looking at it on their own and making poor judgements about them.

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we get to the point where a LLM can say "oh, I made that mistake because I saw this in my training data, which caused these specific weights to be suboptimal, let me update it", that'll be AGI. But as you say, currently, they have zero "self awareness".

> When we get to the point where a LLM can say "oh, I made that mistake because I saw this in my training data, which caused these specific weights to be suboptimal, let me update it", that'll be AGI. While I believe we are far from AGI, I don't think the standard for AGI is an AI doing things a human absolutely cannot do.

All that was described here is learning from a mistake, which is something I hope all humans are capable of.

Re: Reasoning models don't always say what they think

#20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When we get to the point where a LLM can say "oh, I made that mistake because I saw this in my training data, which caused these specific weights to be suboptimal, let me update it", that'll be AGI. While I believe we are far from AGI, I don't think the standard for AGI is an AI doing things a human absolutely cannot do.

All that was described here is learning from a mistake, which is something I hope all humans are capable of.

Yes thank you, that's what I was getting at. Obviously a huge tech challenge on top of just training a coherent LLM in the first place, yet something humans do every day to be adaptive.
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