Comment by bhouston
4 days ago
> They're useful but they are glorified text predictors.
There is a long history of people arguing that intelligence is actually the ability to predict accurately.
https://www.explainablestartup.com/2017/06/why-prediction-is...
> Intelligence isn't just about memorizing facts, it's about reasoning.
Initially, LLMs were basically intuitive predictors, but with chain of thought and more recently agentic experimentation, we do have reasoning in our LLMs that is quite human like.
That said, there is definitely a biased towards training set material, but that is also the case with the large majority of humans.
For the Esoland benchmarks, I would be curious how much adding a SKILLS.md file for each language would boost performance?
I am pretty confidence that we are in the AGI era. It is unsettling and I think it gives people cognitive dissonance so we want to deny it and nitpick it, etc.
> There is a long history of people arguing that intelligence is actually the ability to predict accurately.
That page describes a few recent CS people in AI arguing intelligence is being able to predict accurately which is like carpenters declaring all problems can be solved with a hammer.
AI "reasoning" is human-like in the sense that it is similar to how humans communicate reasoning, but that's not how humans mentally reason.
Like my father before me, I seem to have absorbed an ability to predict what comes next in movies and books. It's sometimes a fun parlor trick to annoy people who actually get genuine surprise out of these nearly deterministic plot twists. But, a bit like with LLMs, it is a superficial ability to follow the limited context that the writers' group is seemingly forced by contract to maintain.
Like my father before me, I've also gotten old enough to to realize that some subset of people out there also behave like they are scripted by the same writers' group and production rules. I fear for the future where LLMs are on an equal footing because we choose to mimic them.
> There is a long history of people arguing that intelligence is actually the ability to predict accurately.
There sure is, and in psychological circles that it appears that there's an argument that that is not the case.
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/linguistics/2024-fedorenko....
> Initially, LLMs were basically intuitive predictors, but with chain of thought and more recently agentic experimentation, we do have reasoning in our LLMs that is quite human like.
If you handwave the details away, then sure it's very human like, though the reasoning models just kind of feed the dialog back to itself to get something more accurate. I use Claude code like everyone else, and it will get stuck on the strangest details that humans actively wouldn't.
> For the Esoland benchmarks, I would be curious how much adding a SKILLS.md file for each language would boost performance?
Tough to say since I haven't done it, though I suspect it wouldn't help much, since there's still basically no training data for advanced programs in these languages.
> I am pretty confidence that we are in the AGI era. It is unsettling and I think it gives people cognitive dissonance so we want to deny it and nitpick it, etc.
Even if you're right about this being the AGI era, that doesn't mean that current models are AGI, at least not yet. It feels like you're actively trying to handwave away details.
> though the reasoning models just kind of feed the dialog back to itself to get something more accurate.
Much of our reasoning is based on stimulating our sensory organs, either via imagination (self-stimulation of our visual system) or via subvocalization (self-stimulation of our auditory system), etc.
> it will get stuck on the strangest details that humans actively wouldn't.
It isn't a human. It is AGI, not HGI.
> It feels like you're actively trying to handwave away details.
Maybe. I don't think so though.