| ▲ | chrisjj 4 hours ago |
| > A coding agent solving a software-engineering task spends dozens of steps reasoning No. That's simple PR hype. Parrotry is not reasoning. |
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| ▲ | astro1234 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Why not? I think there’s fairly strong evidence that there is something that convincingly looks like reasoning. I think anthropic has done some nice circuit tracing and mechanistic interpretability work on this for instance. |
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| ▲ | Planktonne 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I think there’s fairly strong evidence that there is something that convincingly looks like reasoning. No one is disputing that, but there is an enormous difference between evidence of 'something that looks like a thing' and evidence of the thing itself. | | |
| ▲ | astro1234 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I tend to agree but to adjudicate that someone has to define what they consider reasoning to be. | | |
| ▲ | encyclopedism 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | What is 'reasoning' or IQ or more importantly consciousness are very difficult open questions in science. An approach that might shed some light is instead to define what consciousness ISN'T or what thinking ISN'T. Naively let us say consciousness is NOT a large list of weights (i.e. an LLM). The uncanny emergent ability of an LLM depends entirely on training data. A mathematical model is used to match output against training data (via loss functions etc). The training data contains all the human ingenuity, logic, rational, patterns and features. Try giving an LLM model the alphabet ALONE and see what it comes up with? Why are you able to immediately reason that given the alphabet alone it could not 'reason', 'think' or produce much of anything useful. To address briefly the idea of reasoning and something assembling reasoning somehow implying the same thing. Try the following thought experiment. Given a simulated world (e.g. The Matrix), no matter how good the simulation you would not actually get WET. | |
| ▲ | Planktonne an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Crucially it's the responsibility of those who are making the claim here to bring evidence and definitions. The other approach, very popular on HN, has led to endless carping by people making outlandish claims without evidence and then demanding that every term possible be defined before they can be dismissed out of hand. The claim that any two things are equivalent just because they look similar is a strong one, and the onus is on the person advancing it to bring evidence, not to insist that they are considered correct until it is disproved. That's how it works with the flat earth and religion and everything else; we shouldn't accept an unsupported conclusion just because some people really, really like AI and don't want to have to justify their claims. The traditional response to such claims is ridicule [1]; we know trivially from all sorts of examples that presentation is not identity, and so 'but it looks similar' is not a convincing stance. 1 https://sites.psu.edu/sierraastle/2019/10/21/behold-a-man/ | | |
| ▲ | rlt an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Crucially it's the responsibility of those who are making the claim here to bring evidence and definitions Ok, I claim that if something draws reasonable conclusions to questions it hasn't previously seen by performing steps that look like reasoning, then it is reasoning. If you disagree then please define reasoning. | | |
| ▲ | Planktonne an hour ago | parent [-] | | This is actually a perfect example of what I was referring to in my earlier comment; the strident [1] and rather aggressive insistence that your unsupported belief be proved wrong, rather than you providing literally any evidence that two distinct things are identical other than the assertion itself. You're making a strong claim here; the burden of proof [2] lies with you, in much the same way that it would if you declared that horoscopes know the future. We have a sufficient explanation for LLM behaviour that we have no reason to discard based solely on your whim; if you want to be convincing, then you'll need more than assertion. Similar appearance does not mean identical nature, and your position does not warrant serious consideration until you provide support for it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) | | |
| ▲ | rlt an hour ago | parent [-] | | I provided my definition and argument. I can't engage further if you don't refute any of it. |
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| ▲ | chrisjj 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > there is something that convincingly looks like reasoning Convincing ... people who believe chatbots are intelligent? Well sure. | | |
| ▲ | astro1234 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don’t mean to say you are wrong, I just mean to ask what criteria you would consider necessary to satisfy in order for you to consider a system to be reasoning. |
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| ▲ | brookst 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is a certain amount of irony in your comment that I hope you appreciate. |
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| ▲ | vidarh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What exactly do you consider reasoning? |
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| ▲ | coldtea 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You keep repeating this throughout the thread, one could even say just like a certain class of exotic birds :) Why couldn't parroting, after a certain level and complexity of the parroting infrastructure, be reasoning? What a priori restriction forbids it from being such? Flipping a NAND is not calculation either. Billions of them? Things change. |
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| ▲ | HarHarVeryFunny 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Copying someone else's reasoning process (as best you understand it) is still a limited form of reasoning, even if it might be considered as cargo-cult reasoning (copying without understanding). |
