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Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

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11–20 of 191 posts

Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

#11
post #6

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…

Congratulations, you've invented philosophy.

Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

#12
This paper I read from here has an interesting mathematical model for reasoning based on cognitive science. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21734 (there is also code here https://github.com/sapientinc/HRM) I think we will see dramatic performance increases on "reasoning" problems when this is worked into existing AI architectures.

Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

#13
post #9

> 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…

By this definition a bag of answers is causal reasoning because we previously filled the bag, which caused what we pulled. State causing a result is not causal reasoning.

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?

#14
post #6

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…

Congratulations, you've invented philosophy.

This is an obnoxious response. Of course I recognize that philosophy is the solution to this. What I am pointing out is that philosophy has not as of yet resolved these relatively new problems. The idea that non-human intelligences might exist is of course an old one, but that is different from having an actual (potentially) existing one to reckon with.

Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

#15
post #9

> 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…

But let's say you change your mathematical expression by reducing or expanding it somehow, then, unless it's trivial, there are infinite ways to do it, and the "cause" here is the answer to the question of "why did you do that and not something else"? Brute force excluded, the cause is probably some idea, some model of the problem or a gut feeling (or desperation..) ..

Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

#17
post #4

I 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…

>I 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.

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".

What's stopping us from building an LLM that can build causal trees, rejecting some trees and accepting others based on whatever evidence it is fed?

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.

Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

#20
When Using AI they say "Context is King". "Reasoning" models are using the AI to generate context. They are not reasoning in the sense of logic, or philosophy. Mirage, whatever you want to call it, it is rather unlike what people mean when they use the term reasoning. Calling it reasoning is up there with calling generating out put people don't like hallucinations.
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