Author here and I welcome the feedback, but I don't really understand your point. My post is clearly not dismissive of efforts to make LLMs reason using CoT prompting techniques and post-training, and I think such efforts are even mentioned. The model remains autoregressive either way, and this reasoning is not some kind of magic that makes them behave differently - these improvements only make them perform (much) better on given tasks.
Additionally, I'm not dismissive of the non-linear nature of transformers which I'm familiar with. Attention mechanism is a lot more complex than a linear relationship between the prediction and the past inputs, yes. But the end result remains sequential prediction. Ironically, diffusion models are kind of the opposite: sequential internally, parallel prediction at each step.
(Note: added note on terminology since the confusion arised by my use of "linearity", which was not referring to the attention mechanism itself. I've read so many papers that are perfectly fine with the use of "autoregressive" for this paradigm that I forgot some people coming from traditional statistics may be confused. Also "based on the last word" was wrong and meant "last words" or "previous words", obviously.)
All that being said, I don't think it's fair to say one doesn't understand how transformers work solely because of semantic interpretation. I appreciate the feedback though!
Additionally, I'm not dismissive of the non-linear nature of transformers which I'm familiar with. Attention mechanism is a lot more complex than a linear relationship between the prediction and the past inputs, yes. But the end result remains sequential prediction. Ironically, diffusion models are kind of the opposite: sequential internally, parallel prediction at each step.
(Note: added note on terminology since the confusion arised by my use of "linearity", which was not referring to the attention mechanism itself. I've read so many papers that are perfectly fine with the use of "autoregressive" for this paradigm that I forgot some people coming from traditional statistics may be confused. Also "based on the last word" was wrong and meant "last words" or "previous words", obviously.)
All that being said, I don't think it's fair to say one doesn't understand how transformers work solely because of semantic interpretation. I appreciate the feedback though!