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Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?

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

#41

Post by CuriouslyC »

robviren wrote: 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…

They're already implementing branching thought and taking the best one, eventually the entire response will be branched, with branches being spawned and culled by some metric over the lifetime of the completion. It's just not feasible now for performance reasons.

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

#42

Post by NitpickLawyer »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #24
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #2

Finally! A good take on that paper. I saw that arstechnica article posted everywhere, and most of the comments are full of confirmation bias, and almost all of them miss the fineprint - it was tested on a 4 layer deep toy model. It's nice to read a post that actually digs deeper and offers perspectives on what might be a good finding vs. just warranting more research.

> it was tested on a 4 layer deep toy model How do you see that impacting the results? It is the same algorithm just on a smaller scale. I would assume a 4 layer model would not be very good, but does reasoning improve it? Is there a reason scale would impact the use of reasoning?

There's prior research that finds a connection between model depth and "reasoning" ability - https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03961

A depth of 4 is very small. It is very much a toy model. It's ok to research this, and maybe someone will try it out on larger models, but it's totally not ok to lead with the conclusion, based on this toy model, IMO.

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

#43

Post by pinoy420 »

azrazalea_debt wrote: post #37
stonemetal12 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was tested on a 4 layer deep toy model How do you see that impacting the results? It is the same algorithm just on a smaller scale. I would assume a 4 layer model would not be very good, but does reasoning improve it? Is there a reason scale would impact the use of reasoning?

A lot of current LLM work is basically emergent behavior. They use a really simple core algorithm and scale it up, and interesting things happen. You can read some of anthropic's recent papers to see some of this, like: They didn't expect LLMs could "lookahead" when writing poetry. However, when they actually went in and watched what was happening (there's details on how this "watching" works on their blog/in their s…

[dead]

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

#44

Post by mdp2021 »

modeless wrote: post #34

"The question [whether computers can think] is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, 24 November 1983

But the topic here is whether some techniques are progressive or not

(with a curious parallel about whether some paths in thought are dead-ends - the unproductive focus mentioned in the article).

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

#45

Post by mdp2021 »

empath75 wrote: post #38
mdp2021 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which seem to be very like how we think I would like to reassure you that we - we here - see LLMs are very much unlike us.

Yes I very much understand that most people do not think that LLMs think or understand like we do, but it is _very difficult_ to prove that that is the case, using any test which does not also exclude a great deal of people. And that is because "thinking like we do" is not at all a well-defined concept.

> exclude a great deal of people

And why should you not exclude them. Where does this idea come from, taking random elements as models. Where do you see pedestals of free access? Is the Nobel Prize a raffle now?

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

#46

Post by mdp2021 »

adastra22 wrote: post #23
stonemetal12 wrote: post #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.

You are making the same mistake OP is calling out. As far as I can tell “generating context” is exactly what human reasoning is too. Consider the phrase “let’s reason this out” where you then explore all options in detail, before pronouncing your judgement. Feels exactly like what the AI reasoner is doing.

But a big point here becomes whether the generated "context" then receives proper processing.

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

#48

Post by slashdave »

adastra22 wrote: post #23
stonemetal12 wrote: post #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.

You are making the same mistake OP is calling out. As far as I can tell “generating context” is exactly what human reasoning is too. Consider the phrase “let’s reason this out” where you then explore all options in detail, before pronouncing your judgement. Feels exactly like what the AI reasoner is doing.

Perhaps we can find some objective means to decide, rather than go with what "feels" correct

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #39
adastra22 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making the same mistake OP is calling out. As far as I can tell “generating context” is exactly what human reasoning is too. Consider the phrase “let’s reason this out” where you then explore all options in detail, before pronouncing your judgement. Feels exactly like what the AI reasoner is doing.

"let's reason this out" is about gathering all the facts you need, not just noting down random words that are related. The map is not the terrain, words are not facts.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by sixdimensional »

I feel like the fundamental concept of symbolic logic[1] as a means of reasoning fits within the capabilities of LLMs.

Whether it's a mirage or not, the ability to produce a symbolically logical result that has valuable meaning seems real enough to me.

Especially since most meaning is assigned by humans onto the world... so too can we choose to assign meaning (or not) to the output of a chain of symbolic logic processing?

Edit: maybe it is not so much that an LLM calculates/evaluates the result of symbolic logic as it is that it "follows" the pattern of logic encoded into the model.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

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