Comment by tmnvdb
2 months ago
> No, it's the entire architecture of the model.
Wrong, it's an artifact of tokenizing. The model doesn't have access to the individual letters, only to the tokens. Reasoning models can usually do this task well - they can spell out the word in the reasoning buffer - the fact that GPT5 fails here is likely a result of it incorrectly answering the question with a non-reasoning version of the model.
> There's no real reasoning.
This seems like a meaningless statement unless you give a clear definition of "real" reasoning as opposed to other kinds of reasoning that are only apparant.
> It seems that reasoning is just a feedback loop on top of existing autocompletion.
The word "just" is doing a lot of work here - what exactly is your criticism here? The bitter lesson of the past years is that relatively simple architectures that scale with compute work surprisingly well.
> It's really disingenuous for the industry to call warming tokens for output, "reasoning," as if some autocomplete before more autocomplete is all we needed to solve the issue of consciousness.
Reasoning and consciousness are seperate concepts. If I showed the output of an LLM 'reasoning' (you can call it something else if you like) to somebody 10 years ago they would agree without any doubt that reasoning was taking place there. You are free to provide a definition of reasoning which an LLM does not meet of course - but it is not enough to just say it is so. Using the word autocomplete is rather meaningless name-calling.
> Edit: Letter frequency apparently has just become another scripted output, like doing arithmetic. LLMs don't have the ability to do this sort of work inherently, so they're trained to offload the task.
Not sure why this is bad. The implicit assumption seems to be that an LLM is only valueable if it literally does everything perfectly?
> Edit: This comment appears to be wildly upvoted and downvoted. If you have anything to add besides reactionary voting, please contribute to the discussion.
Probably because of the wild assertions, charged language, and rather superficial descriptions of actual mechanics.
These aren't wild assertions. I'm not using charged language.
> Reasoning and consciousness are seperate(sic) concepts
No, they're not. But, in tech, we seem to have a culture of severing the humanities for utilitarian purposes, but no, classical reasoning uses consciousness and awareness as elements of processing.
It's only meaningless if you don't know what the philosophical or epistemological definitions of reasoning are. Which is to say, you don't know what reasoning is. So you'd think it was a meaningless statement.
Do computers think, or do they compute?
Is that a meaningless question to you? I'm sure given your position it's irrelevant and meaningless, surely.
And this sort of thinking is why we have people claiming software can think and reason.
> > > Reasoning and consciousness are seperate(sic) concepts
> No, they're not. But, in tech, we seem to have a culture of severing the humanities for utilitarian purposes [...] It's only meaningless if you don't know what the philosophical or epistemological definitions of reasoning are.
As far as I'm aware, in philosophy they'd generally be considered different concepts with no consensus on whether or not one requires the other. I don't think it can be appealed to as if it's a settled matter.
Personally I think people put "learning", "reasoning", "memory", etc. on a bit too much of a pedestal. I'm fine with saying, for instance, that if something changes to refine its future behavior in response to its experiences (touch hot stove, get hurt, avoid in future) beyond the immediate/direct effect (withdrawing hand) then it can "learn" - even for small microorganisms.
You have again answered with your customary condescension. Is that really necessary? Everything you write is just dripping with patronizing superiority and combatative sarcasm.
> "classical reasoning uses consciousness and awareness as elements of processing"
They are not the _same_ concept then.
> It's only meaningless if you don't know what the philosophical or epistemological definitions of reasoning are. Which is to say, you don't know what reasoning is. So you'd think it was a meaningless statement.
The problem is the only information we have is internal. So we may claim those things exist in us. But we have no way to establish if they are happening in another person, let alone in a computer.
> Do computers think, or do they compute?
Do humans think? How do you tell?