> I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine.
No we're not, and no they are not.
An LLM doesn't reason, period. It mimics reasoning ability by stochastically chosing a sequence of tokens. Alot of the time these make sense. At other times, they don't make any sense. I recently asked an LLM:
"Mike leaves the elevator at the 2nd floor. Jenny leaves at the 9th floor. Who left the elevator first?"
It answered correctly that Mike leaves first. Then I asked:
"If the elevator started at the 10th floor, who would have left first?"
And the answer was that Mike still leaves first, because he leaves at the 2nd floor, and that's the first floor the elevator reaches. Another time I asked an LLM how many footballs fit in a coffe-mug, and the conversation reached a point where the AI tried to convince me, that coffe-mugs are only slightly smaller than the trunk of a car.
Yes, they can also produce the correct answers to both these questions, but the fact that they can also spew such complete illogical nonsense shows that they are not "reasoning" about things. They complete sequences, that's it, period, that's literally the only thing a language model can do.
Their apparent emergent abilities look like reasoning, in the same way as Jen from "The IT crowd" can sound like shes speaking Italian, when in fact she has no idea what she is even saying.
No we're not, and no they are not.
An LLM doesn't reason, period. It mimics reasoning ability by stochastically chosing a sequence of tokens. Alot of the time these make sense. At other times, they don't make any sense. I recently asked an LLM:
It answered correctly that Mike leaves first. Then I asked: And the answer was that Mike still leaves first, because he leaves at the 2nd floor, and that's the first floor the elevator reaches. Another time I asked an LLM how many footballs fit in a coffe-mug, and the conversation reached a point where the AI tried to convince me, that coffe-mugs are only slightly smaller than the trunk of a car.Yes, they can also produce the correct answers to both these questions, but the fact that they can also spew such complete illogical nonsense shows that they are not "reasoning" about things. They complete sequences, that's it, period, that's literally the only thing a language model can do.
Their apparent emergent abilities look like reasoning, in the same way as Jen from "The IT crowd" can sound like shes speaking Italian, when in fact she has no idea what she is even saying.