Comment by theteapot
1 day ago
> It helps to know that LLMs don’t “reason”. They predict ..
Semantics. Prediction is the training objective. The ability to reason can be, and very arguably is, an emergent property of that.
1 day ago
> It helps to know that LLMs don’t “reason”. They predict ..
Semantics. Prediction is the training objective. The ability to reason can be, and very arguably is, an emergent property of that.
I've never found these discussions to be all that useful, because it's hard to define what conditions are sufficient to say something is "thinking" or "reasoning". It just ends up being circular and metaphysical arguments.
That being said, current generation LLMs do have issue, it's more productive to talk about those and their impact on real tasks (long term memory, continual learning, tokenization, context rot, reversal curse, etc)
AKA semantics.
Even if that was true, you'd have to still prove it has emerged.
What would be your test to determine that?
By that standard, human brains don't either. Our externalizations of concepts like language or symbolic structure allow us to do so. In the parlance of our times, we built our own reasoning harnesses because our intuition lead us to do so.
> By that standard, human brains don't either.
Exactly. If LLMs don’t reason, then neither do humans.
Functionally, we can analyze LLM output and point to examples of reasoning, and examples that imply understanding.
The problem is there’s a lot of superstition around words like reasoning and understanding. People imagine some ineffable quality that only humans possess that distinguish what they do from what models can do, but they can’t define it - most likely, because it doesn’t exist.
Maybe it looks like reasoning, and maybe that's enough for some.
Why would "reasoning" be an emergent property of prediction?
There's a lot of reasoning in the training data.
Why wouldn’t it?
Predict multiple outcomes, induct across them, refine.
How do you predict without reasoning?
Where is the reasoning in linear regression?
15 replies →
Flip a coin.
No. You're simply wrong.