Earlier quoted context omitted.
Novel as in requiring novel reasoning to sort out. One of the classic ways to expose the issue is to take a common puzzle and introduce irrelevant details and perhaps trivialize the solution. LLMs pattern match on the general form of the puzzle and then wander down the garden path to an incorrect solution that no human would fall for. The sort of generalization these things can do seems to mostly be the trivial sort:…
Well the problem with that approach is that LLMs are still both incredibly dumb and small, at least compared to the what, 700T params of a human brain? Can't compare the two directly, especially when one has a massive recall advantage that skews the perception of that. But there is still some inteligence under there that's not just memorization. Not much, but some. So if you present a novel problem it would need to b…
Anyway the novel problems I’m talking about are extremely simple. Basically they’re variations on the “farmer, 3 animals, and a rowboat” problem. People keep finding trivial modifications to the problem that fool the LLMs but wouldn’t fool a child. Then the vendors come along and patch the model to deal with them. This is what I mean by whack-a-mole.
Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment tells us that enough games of whack-a-mole could eventually get us to a pretty good facsimile of reasoning without ever achieving the genuine article.