Can We Understand How Large Language Models Reason? (cacm.acm.org)

35 points by adunk 2 hours ago

warumdarum 35 minutes ago

They dont. They have input that runs through a invisible stochastic canyon. As long as there is previous experience the stochastic canyon never ends. If there is none or isignificant one, or it runs out of tokkens, it hallucinates and the illusion falls apart. There is no reasoning, just the invisible grand canyon of all of human experience and knowledge. PS: try to get it to retell you a clichee movie or book and you can see life near the end, how the delta of all the same movies opens up into wildly different endings.

To advance further it would need the ability to abstract away the general situation shape and pattern recognize similar situations.

red75prime 15 minutes ago

Stochastic gradient descent can be likened to traveling down a billion-dimensional canyon. But inference? Hardly.

alchemist1e9 6 minutes ago

It’s curious how they solve unsolved math problems without reasoning. Maybe I have a different definition of reasoning than you.

emp17344 3 minutes ago

Guess what? SAT solvers have also solved unsolved math problems. Do you believe they are “reasoning”?

CrzyLngPwd 37 minutes ago

My toaster doesn't reason, and neither do the current clankers.

gfody 25 minutes ago

there's a 2MP about the related paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l72ufA-4SzE

analog31 an hour ago

Do LLMs have Qualia?

wat10000 9 minutes ago

Do people?

calf 36 minutes ago

One plausible reason I thought of that we may not understand neural nets is that by their nature their power grows with ever-more complex connections and weights.

So it is like the opposite of logical systems, in that the very design of neural net architecture is a mess of parameter "spaghetti code" which renders the entire thing a metaphorical encrypted black box. The more powerful an AI/AGI the more this would be the case, and this is analogous a complexity curve.

And so any effort to make sense of such black box computation would be like trying to reverse entropy, analogous to trying to recover information lost in waste heat. And that could be one fundamental barrier to understanding both human and artificial brains alike, relative to their internal complexity.

(Just thinking aloud my handwavy pet theory recently, I am not an expert and could be totally mistaken on this)

chrisjj an hour ago

Clickbait article title.

The article body does not presume they reason.

otabdeveloper4 38 minutes ago

They don't reason.

JackSlateur an hour ago

Do they ?

azakai an hour ago

The article answers this question, at least to the extent it can be answered, at this time.

We see some signs of reasoning, but also we understand little about how they work.

michaelchisari an hour ago

Do we see actual signs of reasoning or is it anthropomorphism? We have an innate tendency to do so as humans.

blooalien 44 minutes ago

azakai 43 minutes ago

arcanemachiner an hour ago

Yes, there is an LLM feature that we have anthropomorphized as "reasoning" or "thinking", where an LLM has a scratch space where it can dump tokens that help to improve the final output.

otabdeveloper4 37 minutes ago

> that help to improve the final output

Do they actually help? Are you sure?

throw310822 an hour ago

Of course they do, how else do you think they manage to implement new features in large codebases, or to prove new theorems? But you don't even have to assume they do because of the results- you can read their chain of thought.

chrisjj 44 minutes ago

The Eliza effect strikes.

throw310822 20 minutes ago

3848499449 44 minutes ago

they don't tho

ToValueFunfetti 36 minutes ago