Comment by janalsncm
2 years ago
The point of “verbalizing” the chain of thought isn’t that it’s the most effective method. And frankly I don’t think it matters that humans think non verbally. The goal isn’t to create a human in a box. Verbalizing the chain of thought allows us to audit the thought process, and also create further labels for training.
No, the point of verbalizing the chain of thought is that it's all we know how to do right now.
> And frankly I don’t think it matters that humans think non verbally
You're right, that's not the reason non-verbal is better, but it is evidence that non-verbal is probably better. I think the reason it's better is that language is extremely lossy and ambiguous, which makes a poor medium for reasoning and precise thinking. It would clearly be better to think without having to translate to language and back all the time.
Imagine you had to solve a complicated multi-step physics problem, but after every step of the solution process your short term memory was wiped and you had to read your entire notes so far as if they were someone else's before you could attempt the next step, like the guy from Memento. That's what I imagine being an LLM using CoT is like.
I mean a lot of problems are amenable to subdivision into parts where the process of each part is not needed for the other parts. It's not even clear that humans usually hold in memory all of process of the previous parts especially the it won't be used later.