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Learning to Reason with LLMs

openai.com

601–610 of 1001 posts

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#601

What sticks out to me is the 60% win rate vs GPT-4o when it comes to actual usage by humans for programming tasks. So in reality it's barely better than GPT-4o. That the figure is higher for mathematical calculation isn't surprising because LLMs were much worse at that than at programming to begin with.

I'm not sure that's the right way to interpret it.

If some tasks are too easy, both models might give satisfactory answers, in which case the human preference might as well be a coin toss.

I don't know the specifics of their methodology though.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#602
post #526

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

LLMs perform well on small tasks that are well defined. This definition matches almost every task that a student will work on in school leading to an overestimation of LLM capabiity. LLMs cannot decide what to work on, or manage large bodies of work/code easily. They do not understand the risk of making a change and deploying it to production, or play nicely in autonomous settings. There is going to be a massive amou…

Careers are 30 years long

Can you confidently say that an LLM won’t be better than an average 22 year old coder within these 30 years?

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#603

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

There's an equal amount of hopium from the AI stans here as well.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in a technology and they need to find a way to start making a profit or they're going to run out of VC money.

You still have to know what to build and how to specify what you want. Plain language isn't great at being precise enough for these things.

Some people say they'll keep using stuff like this as a tool. I wouldn't bet the farm that it's going to replace humans at any point.

Besides, programming is fun.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#604
post #8

The model performance is driven by chain of thought, but they will not be providing chain of thought responses to the user for various reasons including competitive advantage. After the release of GPT4 it became very common to fine-tune non-OpenAI models on GPT4 output. I’d say OpenAI is rightly concerned that fine-tuning on chain of thought responses from this model would allow for quicker reproduction of their resu…

I see chain of thought responses in chatgpt android app.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#605
post #93
post #8

The model performance is driven by chain of thought, but they will not be providing chain of thought responses to the user for various reasons including competitive advantage. After the release of GPT4 it became very common to fine-tune non-OpenAI models on GPT4 output. I’d say OpenAI is rightly concerned that fine-tuning on chain of thought responses from this model would allow for quicker reproduction of their resu…

The open source/weights models so far have proved that openAI doesn't have some special magic sauce. I m confident we ll soon have a model from Meta or others that s close to this level of reasoning. [Also consider that some of their top researchers have departed] On a cursory look, it looks like the chain of thought is a long series of chains of thought balanced on each step, with a small backtracking added whenever…

I would love to see Meta releasing CoT specialized model as a LoRa we can apply to existing 3.1 models

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#606

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

If AI becomes good enough to replace software engineers, it has already become good enough to replace other brain jobs (lawyers, physicians, accountant, etc). I feel that software engineering is one of the very last jobs to be replaced by AI.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#607

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

There is little to no research that shows modern AI can perform even the most simple long-running task without training data on that exact problem.

To my knowledge, there is no current AI system that can replace a white collar worker in any multistep task. The only thing they can do is support the worker.

Most jobs are safe for the forseable future. If your job is highly repetitive and a company can produce a perfect dataset of it, I'd worry.

Jobs like a factory worker and call center support are in danger. But the work is perfectly monitorable.

Watch the GAIA benchmark. It's not nearly the complexity of a real-world job, but it would signal the start of an actual agentic system being possible.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#608
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two basic versions of “safety” which are related, but distinct: One version of “safety” is a pernicious censorship impulse shared by many modern intellectuals, some of whom are in tech. They believe that they alone are capable of safely engaging with the world of ideas to determine what is true, and thus feel strongly that information and speech ought to be censored to prevent the rabble from engaging in wr…

> In order for AIs to fit into our society and behave ethically they need to know how to flag that thought as a bad idea and not act on it. Don’t you think that by just parsing the internet and the classical literature, the LLM would infer on its own that poisoning someone to solve a problem is not okay? I feel that in the end the only way the “safety” is introduced today is by censoring the output.

LLMs are still fundamentally, at their core, next-token predictors.

Presuming you have an interface to a model where you can edit the model’s responses and then continue generation, and/or where you can insert fake responses from the model into the submitted chat history (and these two categories together make up 99% of existing inference APIs), all you have to do is to start the model off as if it was answering positively and/or slip in some example conversation where it answered positively to the same type of problematic content.

From then on, the model will be in a prediction state where it’s predicting by relying on the part of its training that involved people answering the question positively.

The only way to avoid that is to avoid having any training data where people answer the question positively — even in the very base-est, petabytes-of-raw-text “language” training dataset. (And even then, people can carefully tune the input to guide the models into a prediction phase-space position that was never explicitly trained on, but is rather an interpolation between trained-on points — that’s how diffusion models are able to generate images of things that were never included in the training dataset.)

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#609
post #439

The "safety" example in the "chain-of-thought" widget/preview in the middle of the article is absolutely ridiculous. Take a step back and look at what OpenAI is saying here "an LLM giving detailed instructions on the synthesis of strychnine is unacceptable, here is what was previously generated vs our preferred, neutered content " What's this obsession with "safety" when it comes to LLMs? "This knowledge is perfectly…

There are two basic versions of “safety” which are related, but distinct: One version of “safety” is a pernicious censorship impulse shared by many modern intellectuals, some of whom are in tech. They believe that they alone are capable of safely engaging with the world of ideas to determine what is true, and thus feel strongly that information and speech ought to be censored to prevent the rabble from engaging in wr…

> They believe that they alone are capable of safely engaging with the world of ideas to determine what is true, and thus feel strongly that information and speech ought to be censored to prevent the rabble from engaging in wrongthink.

This is a particularly ungenerous take. The AI companies don't have to believe that they (or even a small segment of society) alone can be trusted before it makes sense to censor knowledge. These companies build products that serve billions of people. Once you operate at that level of scale, you will reach all segments of society, including the geniuses, idiots, well-meaning and malevolents. The question is how do you responsibly deploy something that can be used for harm by (the small number of) terrible people.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#610

Some practical notes from digging around in their documentation: In order to get access to this, you need to be on their tier 5 level, which requires $1,000 total paid and 30+ days since first successful payment. Pricing is $15.00 / 1M input tokens and $60.00 / 1M output tokens. Context window is 128k token, max output is 32,768 tokens. There is also a mini version with double the maximum output tokens (65,536 tokens…

Reasoning tokens are indeed billed as output tokens.

> While reasoning tokens are not visible via the API, they still occupy space in the model's context window and are billed as output tokens.

From here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/reasoning

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