One thing that LLMs have exposed is how much of a house of cards all of our definitions of "human mind"-adjacent concepts are. We have a single example in all of reality of a being that thinks like we do, and so all of our definitions of thinking are inextricably tied with "how humans think", and now we have an entity that does things which seem to be very like how we think, but not _exactly like it_, and a lot of ou…
Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
11–20 of 191 posts
Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
#12Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
#13> Whether AI reasoning is “real” reasoning or just a mirage can be an interesting question, but it is primarily a philosophical question. It depends on having a clear definition of what “real” reasoning is, exactly. It's pretty easy: causal reasoning. Causal, not statistic correlation only as LLM do, with or without "CoT".
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure it's so simple. LLMs are called causal models in the sense that earlier tokens "cause" later tokens, that is, later tokens are causally dependent on what the earlier tokens are. If you mean deterministic rather than probabilistic, even Pearl-style causal models are probabilistic. I think the author is circling around the idea that their idea of reasoning is to produce statements…
You need to actually have something that deduces a result from a set of principles that form a logical conclusion or the understanding that more data is needed to make a conclusion. That is clearly different than finding a likely next token on statics alone, despite the fact the statical answer can be correct.
Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
#14One thing that LLMs have exposed is how much of a house of cards all of our definitions of "human mind"-adjacent concepts are. We have a single example in all of reality of a being that thinks like we do, and so all of our definitions of thinking are inextricably tied with "how humans think", and now we have an entity that does things which seem to be very like how we think, but not _exactly like it_, and a lot of ou…
Congratulations, you've invented philosophy.
Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
#15> Whether AI reasoning is “real” reasoning or just a mirage can be an interesting question, but it is primarily a philosophical question. It depends on having a clear definition of what “real” reasoning is, exactly. It's pretty easy: causal reasoning. Causal, not statistic correlation only as LLM do, with or without "CoT".
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure it's so simple. LLMs are called causal models in the sense that earlier tokens "cause" later tokens, that is, later tokens are causally dependent on what the earlier tokens are. If you mean deterministic rather than probabilistic, even Pearl-style causal models are probabilistic. I think the author is circling around the idea that their idea of reasoning is to produce statements…
Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
#16[flagged]
Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
#17I feel it is interesting but not what would be ideal. I really think if the models could be less linear and process over time in latent space you'd get something much more akin to thought. I've messed around with attaching reservoirs at each layer using hooks with interesting results (mainly over fitting), but it feels like such a limitation to have all model context/memory stuck as tokens when latent space is where…
Please stop, this is how you get AI takeovers.
Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
#18> Whether AI reasoning is “real” reasoning or just a mirage can be an interesting question, but it is primarily a philosophical question. It depends on having a clear definition of what “real” reasoning is, exactly. It's pretty easy: causal reasoning. Causal, not statistic correlation only as LLM do, with or without "CoT".
Or even a causal tool for an LLM agent that operates like what it does when you ask it about math and forwards the request to Wolfram.