LLMs can’t reason — they just crib reasoning-like steps from their training data

Well, two responses I have seen to the claim that LLMs are not reasoning are:

1. we are all just stochastic parrots lmao
2. maybe intelligence is an emergent ability that will show up eventually (disregard the inability to falsify this and the categorical nonsense that is our definition of "emergent").

So I think this research is useful as a response to these, although I think "fuck off, promptfondler" is pretty good too.

there’s a lot of people (especially here, but not only here) who have had the insight to see this being the case, but there’s also been a lot of boosters and promptfondlers (ie. people with a vested interest) putting out claims that their precious word vomit machines are actually thinking

so while this may confirm a known doubt, rigorous scientific testing (and disproving) of the claims is nonetheless a good thing

A lot of people still don't, from what I can gather from some of the comments on "AI" topics. Especially the ones that skew the other way with its "AI" hysteria is often an invite from people who know fuck all about how the tech works. "Nudifier" or otherwise generative images or explicit chats with bots that portray real or underage people being the most common topics that attract emotionally loaded but highly uninformed demands and outrage. Frankly, the whole "AI" topic in the media is so massively overblown on both fronts, but I guess it is good for traffic and nuance is dead anyway.

Isn’t OpenAI saying that o1 has reasoning as a specific selling point?

Yes.

But the lies around them are so excessive that it's a lot easier for executives of a publicly traded company to make reasonable decisions if they have concrete support for it.

Seriously, I've seen 100x more headlines like this than people claiming LLMs can reason. Either they don't understand, or think we don't understand what "artificial" means.

This has been said multiple times but I don't think it's possible to internalize because of how fucking bleak it is.

The VC/MBA class thinks all communication can be distilled into saying the precise string of words that triggers the stochastically desired response in the consumer. Conveying ideas or information is not the point. This is why ChatGPT seems like the holy grail to them, it effortlessly¹ generates mountains of corporate slop that carry no actual meaning. It's all form and no substance, because those people -- their entire existence, the essence of their cursed dark souls -- has no substance.

¹ batteries not included

Perhaps the AI bros “think” by guessing the next word and hoping it’s convincing

Perhaps? Isn't that the definition of LLMs?

Edit: oh, i just realized it's not talking about the LLMs, but about their apologists

(Preface: I work in AI)

Are they a serious researcher in ML with insights into some of the most interesting and complicated intersections of computer science and analytical mathematics, or a promptfondler that earns 3x the former's salary for a nebulous AI startup that will never create anything of value to society? Read on to find out!

what a user “might” mean if they misspell something

this but with extra wasabi

(Preface: I work in AI)

Preface: repent for your sins in sackcloth and ashes.

IMO, LLM’s are what they are, a good way to spit information out fast.

Buh bye now.

It's always funny to see this because you think that you're part of the smart 10% with original thoughts while actually you're the insufferable 10% whose only thought is that of superiority with nothing to back it up.

My cat has more original thoughts than that and he's currently stuck head-first in a cereal box.

You guys always come crawling out from whatever rock you’re hiding under for these posts as if someone saying LLMs aren’t smart makes your spider senses tingle.

It would be almost impressive if it weren’t so stupid.

What if I told you I have the power to ban you from the forum because you're terminally boring?

remember to pick up your coat when you leave

because it encodes semantics.

if it really did so, performance wouldn't swing up or down when you change syntactic or symbolic elements of problems. the only information encoded is language-statistical

thank you for bravely rushing in and providing yet another counterexample to the “but nobody’s actually stupid enough to think they’re anything more than statistical language generators” talking point

so.... a stochastic parrot?

Paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, LLMs don't give you information; they give you information shaped sentences.

They don't encode semantics. They encode the statistical likelihood that each token will follow a given sequence of tokens.

did you ask a LLM for a post to make here? that might explain this mess of a comment

Rooting around for that Luke Skywalker "every single word in that sentence was wrong" GIF....

because it encodes semantics.

Please enlighten me on how? I admit I don't know all the internals of the transformer model, but from what I know it encodes precisely only syntactical information, i.e. what next syntactical token is most likely to follow based on a syntactical context window.

How does it encode semantics? What is the semantics that it encodes? I doubt they have denatotational or operational semantics of natural language, I don't think something like that even exists, so it has to be some smaller model. Actually, it would be enlightening if you could tell me at least what the semantical domain here is, because I don't think there's any naturally obvious choice for that.

guy who totally gets what these words mean: "an llm simply encodes the semantics into the vectors"

thinking is so easy to model when you don’t do it and assume nobody else does either

Let the haters hate.

Despite the welcome growth of atheism, almost all humans at one level or another cling to the idea that our monkey brains are filled with some magic miraculous light that couldn't possibly be replicated. The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script, whether due to individual capacity, or a civilization that largely doesn't reward metacognition or pondering the questions that matter, as that doesn't immediately feed individual productivity or make anyone materially wealthier, that maze doesn't lead to any yummy cheese for us.

AI development isn't finally progressing quickly and making people uncomfortable with its capability because it's catching up to our supposedly transcendental superbrains (that en masse spent hundreds of thousands of years wandering around in the dirt before it finally occurred to any of them that we could grow food seasonally in one place). It's making a lot of humans uncomfortable because it's demonstrating that there isn't a whole hell of a lot to catch up to, especially for an average human.

There's a reason pretty much everyone immediately discarded the Turing Test and basically called it a bullshit metric after elevating it for decades as a major benchmark in the development of AI systems... The moment a technology and design that could readily pass it became available. That's the blind hubris of man on grand display.