There's an interesting example where researchers saw a model approached clock time calculations and calendar month-day calculations using the same methodology. So then is this because an underlying concept of "cyclical measures" has emerged in the network?
To advance further it would need the ability to abstract away the general situation shape and pattern recognize similar situations.
If that works, I think it's fair to say that LLM's are inanimate processes can generate real reasoning. You can tell when you read it and it makes sense.
There are likely some kinds of reasoning that can't be written down, as well as other forms of understanding, but they also don't replicate nearly as easily.
1. phenomenal reasoning, requiring consciousness and subjective experience
2. functional reasoning, transforming premises into conclusions using logic
I think you are attacking this using definition 1, whereas the article is obviously aiming at a different type of reasoning, and trying to formalize what is actually going on. It seems to be a genuine effort.
I think it is incumbent upon anyone arguing that something does not posses any given property to provide a non-circular definition of what it is that they are declaring an absence of.
All of the descriptions of experiential reasoning are usually defined in terms of rephrasing of the claim "true understanding", "conscious", "aware", "knowing" all hinge on a synonymous aspect of the words that try and shift the responsibly of explanation to the next term used in a cyclic manner.
For the weaker sense of reasoning, there simply isn't any argument that it is not happening. A calculator can perform the weaker sense. The analysis of this aspect of LLMs is purely a question of how, not what.
The LLM has to compress everyy question/prompt into its system. It does so by creating rules and ways of processing data (this can lead to AGI, world models or an architecture of sub architectures like an LLM + something else). So if it should respond in a way that only reasoning people can achieve, it might be able to learn a representation of what we call reasoning.
It read enough text in itself to even know about the concept of reasoning and how you would do that.
Even if this is only stochastic, it shouldn't be so devalued as your comment comes across.
Who says that we are doing anything more magic?
This needs to be routine to be given asevidence…
…Unless you know exactly how the llm was trained and then how it was applied
I wonder if it is the same for programming or not, but I vibe coded an android app just to see if I can and it just works. It required a lot of "build the code and correct the errors" pushing though. For example requested code in kotlin but received something else.
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)
The article body does not presume they reason.
We see some signs of reasoning, but also we understand little about how they work.
This is the part that so many folks just don't seem to understand (probably because it's been labeled as "thinking" or "reasoning" mode, and people assume that words have meaning). It's not reasoning or thought. It's spewing tokens pretending to "think", but it's actually just generating extra "context" to help the final answer be more coherent. The model isn't doing anything it doesn't already do. It's just doing more of it to improve the quality of the final answer displayed to the user.
Do LLMs 'think'? I 'think' they do in a way. I don't really know how I think myself but I know I do and therefore I am (thanks, Descartes). I have a somewhat better grasp of the way LLMs 'think'. They do so sequentially, building a chain of descriptors which best fit the problem and the preceding descriptors. I suspect I do something not entirely dissimilar- i.e. I imagine 'worlds' which are like the current one changed in some way so they the problem I'm working on is reduced, then refine those until it is resolved - but in a massively parallel way.
Whether it's thinking or word prediction or whatever you want to call it, people are trying to understand the causal chain.
Yes, we have a tendency to anthropomorphize, but (most) researchers are aware of this.
That doesn't mean that simulated reasoning isn't useful, it's wildly useful. But a thing is not its simulation.
"The King leaned over, looked and saw, yes, the Middle Ages simulated to a T, all digital, binary , and nonlinear, and there was the land of Dandelia, The Icicle Forest, the palace with the Helical Tower, the Aviary That Neighed, and the Treasury with a Hundred Eyes as well, and there was Ineffabelle herself, taking a slow, stochastic stroll through the simulated garden, and her circuits glowed red and gold as she picked simulated daisies, and hummed a simulated song."
(Stanislaw Lem, Cyberiad)
"Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658"
- On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges
Do they actually help? Are you sure?
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Edit: bad faith actors with no sense of humor downvote this valid starting point of discussion.