Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#11

Post by ookblah »

how about lets stop making AI (i guess LLM here) some monolithic block that applies to every problem we could ever have on this earth? claude might suck at tower of hanoi, but in the end we will just use something better suited to the job. nobody complains that ML or vision models "fail spectacularly" at soemthing it's not suited for.

i get the criticism, but "on the ground" there's real stuff getting done that couldn't be done before. all of this boils down to an intellectual study which, while good to know, is meaningless in the long run. the only thing that matters is if the dollars put in can be recouped to the level of hype created and that answer is probably "maybe" in some areas but not others.

this AI doomerism is getting just as annoying as people claiming AI will replace everyone and everything.

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#12

Post by openplatypus »

feketegy wrote: post #2

In other news, water is wet. I don't think anybody who uses LLMs professionally day-to-day thinks that it can reason like human beings... If some people thought this, they fundamentally do not understand how LLMs work under the hood.

Oh buddy, step our of your bubble. There are people out there who swear by LLM being a modern day mesahiah. And no, this are not just SV VCs trying to sell their investments.

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#13

Post by nantersand »

081guy wrote: post #7
nantersand wrote: post #4

The paper shows reasoning is better than no reasoning, reasoning needs more tokens to work for simple tasks, and that models get confused when things get too complicated. Nothing interesting, on the level of what an undergrad would write for a side project. If it wasn’t “from apple” no one would be mentioning it.

I think that these kind of papers are necessary to ground people back into reality - the hype machine is too strong to be left unguarded.

All the papers I’ve seen show models have limits. This is just an attention grab by lazy “researchers” cashing in on their Apple credentials.

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#14

Post by IshKebab »

Argh please stop. Everyone knows LLMs aren't AGI currently and they have annoying limitations like hallucinations. Even the "giving up" thing was known before Apple's paper.

You aren't winning anything by saying "aha! I told you they are useless!" because they demonstrably aren't.

Yes everybody is hoping that someone will come up with a better algorithm that solves these problems but until they do it's a little like complaining about the invention of the railway because it can only go on tracks while humans can go pretty much anywhere.

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#15

Post by simonklitj »

feketegy wrote: post #2

In other news, water is wet. I don't think anybody who uses LLMs professionally day-to-day thinks that it can reason like human beings... If some people thought this, they fundamentally do not understand how LLMs work under the hood.

I think most people, my close relatives included, who use LLMs professionally day-to-day do not understand how LLMs work under the hood.

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#17

Post by Den_VR »

1dom wrote: post #5

"They're super expensive pattern matchers that break as soon as we step outside their training distribution" - I find it really weird that things like these are seen as some groundbreaking endgame discovery about LLMs LLMs have a real issues with polarisation. It's probably smart people saying all this stuff about knockout blows, and LLM uselessness, but I find them really useful. Is there some emperor's new clothes…

Marcus’s writing is from a scientific perspective, it’s not general artificial intelligence and probably not a meaningful path it GAI.

But the ivory tower misses the point of how LLM improved the ability of regular people to interact with information and technology.

While it might not be the grail they were seeking, it’s still a useful thing what will improve life and in turn be improved.

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#18

Post by sweetjuly »

Aeolun wrote: post #6

Why would they need to execute the algorithm? That feels like complaining your fork doesn’t cut things like a knife would…

The point they draw is that the results are non sequiturs. Reasoning models produce chains of thought (and are sometimes even correct in the chain of thought) and still produce a wrong, logically inconsistent answer. The extreme examples of this is giving the model a step by step guide to complete the program (the Towers program) and it being unable to produce answers which are consistent with the provided plan. So, not only is it unable to produce robust chain of thought, even were it correct and explicit, it cannot mash this information into a reasoned response.

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#19

Post by tlrobinson »

I always assumed LLMs would be one component of “AGI”, but there would be “coprocessors” like logic engines or general purpose code interpreters that would be driven by code or data produced by LLMs just in time.

Re: A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

#20

Post by threeseed »

IshKebab wrote: post #14

Argh please stop. Everyone knows LLMs aren't AGI currently and they have annoying limitations like hallucinations. Even the "giving up" thing was known before Apple's paper. You aren't winning anything by saying "aha! I told you they are useless!" because they demonstrably aren't . Yes everybody is hoping that someone will come up with a better algorithm that solves these problems but until they do it's a little like…

> aha! I told you they are useless

You said this. Neither Apple nor the author did.

The focus was specifically on LLM's reasoning capabilities not whether they are entirely useless or not.

This is relevant because countless startups and investment is predicated on LLM's current capabilities being able to be improved and built on top of. If it is a technological dead-end then we could be in for another long lull in progress. And companies like OpenAI should have their valuations massively cut.

It also constrains the level of investment Apple would need to be comparable to top tier LLM companies.

Post reply on HN