Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the intuition the authors are trying to capture is that they believe the models are omniscient, but also dim-witted. We keep assigning adjectives to this technology that anthropomorphize the neat tricks we've invented. There's nothing "omniscient" or "dim-witted" about these tools. They have no wit. They do not think or reason. All Large "Reasoning" Models do is generate data that they use as context to gen…
> There's nothing "omniscient" or "dim-witted" about these tools. They have no wit. They do not think or reason. > All Large "Reasoning" Models do is generate data that they use as context to generate the final answer. I.e. they do real-time tuning based on synthetic data. I always wonder when people make comments like this if they struggle with analogies. Or if it's a lack of desire to discuss concepts at different…
So when we label the technical processes and algorithms these tools use as something that implies a far greater level of capability, we're only doing a disservice to ourselves. Maybe not to those of us who are getting rich on the market hype that these labels fuel, but certainly to the general population that doesn't understand how the technology works. If we claim that these tools have super-human intelligence, yet they fail basic tasks, how do we explain this? More importantly, if we collectively establish a false sense of security and these tools are adopted in critical processes that human lives depend on, who is blamed when they fail?
> This statement is factually correct and yet the equivalent of describing a computer as nothing more than a collection of gates and wires so shouldn't be discussed at a higher level of abstraction.
No, because we have descriptive language to describe a collection of gates and wires by what it enables us to do: perform arbitrary computations, hence a "computer". These were the same tasks that humans used to do before machines took over, so the collection of gates and wires is just an implementation detail.
Pattern matching, prediction, data generation, etc. are the tasks that modern AI systems allow us to do, yet you want us to refer to this as "intelligence" for some reason? That makes no sense to me. Maybe we need new higher level language to describe these systems, but "intelligence", "thinking", "reasoning" and "wit" shouldn't be part of it.