Well... since o1 (Sept 2024), most models generate a "hidden" thinking trace before the visible answer... surely you have seen this by now: "Wait, that's wrong...", "Ah, now I have the full picture...". The model prunes dead ends when it composes the final answer.
replyDemanding sources for this is odd. It's literally been a headline feature of every frontier model for two years.
I guess you are "technically correct" that no model can "un-emit" tokens... but I don't think that is what anyone was saying or an interesting point to make.
Edit: see also this recent post, which details another place where revisions can happen, upstream of the reasoning token emission:
You're talking about "thinking" models which are mostly regular LLMs trained to output a "<thinking></thinking>" token delimiter before the answer that will be shown to the user, and that's a clever use of the Chain of Thought idea. All of which I'm completely familiar with.
replyGP was saying
> That would be true of non-iterative models that just emit an output from beginning to end.
Which suggests that there are
- "iterative" models
which
- do not output "from beginning to end"
which AFAIK is science-fiction.
The disagreement here seems to be a confusion between the pure model behavior and the behavior that users experience, which is the model wrapped in a harness. It’s normal and natural now to refer to the whole system as ‘the model’ informally, even though that is technically not accurate. That ship sailed a while ago.
replySince the LLM is now designed to run in a harness, it’s really not even wrong any more.
don't think it's that deep mate. just sloppy wording on GP's part.
reply