Incredibly inefficiently because of the recursive loops ("Wait, the object is on the table. I should think about this more deeply..."), and likely instantly surpassed by large world models if/when those are shipped, but effectively enough vs non-thinking models.
Picking the right tool or model is like picking the right problem to work on. It's actually quite hard (often you can't just try them all), but without it you will be incredibly inefficient and occasionally, fundamentally wrong.
All models are wrong, but some are useful. -Box
Similarly for Apple’s “red herring” paper, simply adding a generic caveat to “disregard irrelevant factors” (without specifying which ones) restored performance even in the weaker local llama models back then.
The flaw was not in the reasoning; the flaw seems to be simply that the assumptions we make are often different from the assumptions it makes. I wonder if that might be a fundamental underlying cause of misalignment.
If you were home and a family member asked you that question, you'd probably criticise the question rather than answering. LLM are RLHF'd into being milk-toast helpers that just try to answer questions like that with no criticism.
This is all beside the fact that the world of AI has changed pretty dramatically in the last few months.
It’s nonsense to test if a product that is marketed and sold as being able to provide generalised intelligence on demand, does what it says on the tin?
Check yourself
consider me optimist now, but just few months ago, even frontier models were dumb, doing stupid mistakes all the time, all of them were so dumb I'd never expect anything to change in just few months.
Incidents like hugging face are partly rooted in the lack of common sense. It still functions like a supercharged toddler.
I'd love to overcome this because it'd mean I spend less time guiding the the LLM to produce usable outputs.
And we've had difficulty as humans to childproof our sandboxes and infrastructure. Things that are otherwise innocuous spots to coordinate between like minded toddlers can become problematic.
This is always the issues in the discussions.
There’s the outcomes camp (objectivists?), which points at the things LLMs can do.
Then there’s the process methods camp, which talks about what is actually going on.
If you only care about the outcome, then the process does t matter.
If you are talking about what is happening, what the underlying mechanics and science of it is, then the process matters.
These models aren’t thinking. They simulate cognition well enough to do useful work in several fields and domains.
Both are true.
But the outcomes group "ignores" the fundamental limitations of models which are purely text based.
E.g, a baseball players trains to catch high-speed balls and they dont do it by: "ball velocity 50mph, vector:[1,2,3], run move hand command now"
That's absurd.
No, there is an embodied network which is "trained" on visual, tactile input, and control as direct output.
LLMs are fundamentally not the right tool for that.
That is a NN that learns a skill.
But that is not an Analyst. If it were ballistics, then the answer to "how to parametrize the launch to reliably hit the target" excludes getting the result through natural skill.
The problem lies in the need to get "AI" facing "LLMs": the latter create a need for reliability, for "AI".
Speech is an endowment of both those who give educated guesses via developed skills and of those who return answers like Analysts, who check and compute. LLMs create a confusion between the two, and they will remain a problem until an ability to act as Analysts - strictly - will be implemented.
They are for any definition of the word that makes any kind of sense. I'm sure you have a contorted definition that magically only includes humans though...
For "thinking" here we mean "assessing a representation of an object". That, or equivalent, is required to be reliable. So it is fundamental and critical.
The models are simulating thinking, if the fidelity is good enough for you - great!
The normal definition of the word "thinking" definitely includes what LLMs do. Hell people used to say computers were thinking even before AI. It's super weird to get all uppity about the semantics of the word now.
Uh, no? So much of what we learn and take for granted as common sense is not learned via language, and not even expressible in it.
Given you also don't want it to memorise [for all tokens, count([for all letters]), this would probably be more like "here's two images, count all things in the big image that look like the thing in the small image", which can then be r's in a photo of a raspberry jam jar in a supermarket, or dragons in a photo of a furry convention, or whatever.
That said, they are competent enough at coding that I keep seeing them write code to do even simple tasks.
On a related note: why did I see Claude editing a file by using cat to write a python script to do a grep search and replace?
Of any object in question they should be able to create a representation that allows correct assessment.
> Given you also don't want it to memorise
That is obviously necessary: what we want from the consultant is to check, not to remember. Answers must be correct and that implies having performed all due diligence - and being capable of doing it, before that. So, objects must be instanced internally in a way that allows effective handling. Counting letters is a good example of the ability (that must remain general).
Why not? You've memorized how words are spelled, and how sounds correspond with letters, and how concepts correspond with words. To the extent that there are shortcuts that enable compression you use these, and the model will do something similar.
Being able to spell all the words then count letters is simpler, and more generalisable to other tasks, than memorising answers to all possible word questions.
That said, we're so bad at splitting facts from skills that trying to get them to memorise a bunch of facts might force them to learn a skill and generalise anyway.
Because to "123x456" we want a reply that goes "this times that plus that...", not "Was that not nnnnnn?". If it does not perform its duty (returning solid checked answers) it is a liability.
Nothing intrinsically more or less direct about the LLM's method than ours.
In my mind general intelligence is pretty much by definition a virtual machine, so the mechanisms behind thought are only relevant for the sake of efficiency (ie you can argue that LLMs make a poor basis for intelligence because tokens and natural language are a poor way to encode the world, but if you can run it on a big enough computer to counteract the inherent wasteful virtualisation then who really cares how it works under the hood?)
I will stop here before our analogies go too far.
I've never tried it and it might take some thought and effort to conduct an experiment to find out properly, but I would be interested in the answer.
We can have adequate representations of light that are the instances over which we reason. Your simile is about perception, not about instancing ideas.