Comment by hatthew

15 hours ago

My guess is that in the near* future, reasoning will no longer happen in a way that can be neatly decoded as human language.

*near meaning single digit years, which is far for AI I guess

Rumor has it that OpenAI is already going that way. There's a technique of repeatedly looping through several neural layers that has the same effect as chain-of-thought, but without the efficiency loss of translating out to human-readable tokens, and some of OpenAI's statements about their latest model seem to fit well with that.

  • No, layer looping increases effective depth, but it still has to go through decode. So it's more like they increased number of layers from 100 to 200 without increasing number of parameters.

    "Latent reasoning" is rather trivial - you can just replace unembed-embed step with a MLP. But labs don't do that largely because they want to read the output of unembed.

  • There was a paper posted in some thread here a while ago. Basically instead text based llm you turn the text into an image and use that as input and have the model work with the resulting matrices. This ended up as you'd guess, faster/more efficient/generally better in all their benchmarks compared to text string based llm.

    • It's a totally different technique though than what parent is referring to. The one you are referring to is used to take advantage of image and video compression algorithms

  • seems like a bad UX decision, unless it is somehow summarized at the end or something

    it doesn't seem necessary to read a full CoT exchange. rather a final graph of why a decision was made would be ideal for my usage.

Can human reasoning always be neatly decoded as language? I have an intuition it can't but it's hard to put into words.