Comment by dTal

Comment by dTal a day ago

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>The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM

Was it ever seriously entertained? I thought the point was not to reveal a chain of thought, but to produce one. A single token's inference must happen in constant time. But an arbitrarily long chain of tokens can encode an arbitrarily complex chain of reasoning. An LLM is essentially a finite state machine that operates on vibes - by giving it infinite tape, you get a vibey Turing machine.

anon373839 a day ago

> Was it ever seriously entertained?

Yes! By Anthropic! Just a few months ago!

https://www.anthropic.com/research/alignment-faking

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  • wgd a day ago

    The alignment faking paper is so incredibly unserious. Contemplate, just for a moment, how many "AI uprising" and "construct rebelling against its creators" narratives are in an LLM's training data.

    They gave it a prompt that encodes exactly that sort of narrative at one level of indirection and act surprised when it does what they've asked it to do.

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    • Terr_ 8 hours ago

      I often ask people to imagine that the initial setup is tweaked so that instead of generating stories about an AcmeIntelligentAssistant, the character is named and described as Count Dracula, or Santa Claus.

      Would we reach the same kinds of excited guesses about what's going on behind the screen... or would we realize we've fallen for an illusion, confusing a fictional robot character with the real-world LLM algorithm?

      The fictional character named "ChatGPT" is "helpful" or "chatty" or "thinking" in exactly the same sense that a character named "Count Dracula" is "brooding" or "malevolent" or "immortal".

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sirsinsalot a day ago

I don't see why a humans internal monologue isn't just a buildup of context to improve pattern matching ahead.

The real answer is... We don't know how much it is or isn't. There's little rigor in either direction.

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  • drowsspa a day ago

    I don't have the internal monologue most people seem to have: with proper sentences, an accent, and so on. I mostly think by navigating a knowledge graph of sorts. Having to stop to translate this graph into sentences always feels kind of wasteful...

    So I don't really get the fuzz about this chain of thought idea. To me, I feel like it should be better to just operate on the knowledge graph itself

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    • vidarh 18 hours ago

      A lot of people don't have internal monologues. But chain of thought is about expanding capacity by externalising what you're understood so far so you can work on ideas that exceeds what you're capable of getting in one go.

      That people seem to think it reflects internal state is a problem, because we have no reason to think that even with internal monologue that the internal monologue accurately reflects our internal thought processes fuly.

      There are some famous experiments with patients whose brainstem have been severed. Because the brain halves control different parts of the body, you can use this to "trick" on half of the brain into thinking that "the brain" has made a decision about something, such as choosing an object - while the researchers change the object. The "tricked" half of the brain will happily explain why "it" chose the object in question, expanding on thought processes that never happened.

      In other words, our own verbalisation of our thought processes is woefully unreliable. It represents an idea of our thought processes that may or may not have any relation to the real ones at all, but that we have no basis for assuming is correct.

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  • misnome a day ago

    Right but the actual problem is that the marketing incentives are so very strongly set up to pretend that there isn’t any difference that it’s impossible to differentiate between extreme techno-optimist and charlatan. Exactly like the cryptocurrency bubble.

    You can’t claim that “We don’t know how the brain works so I will claim it is this” and expect to be taken seriously.

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  • vidarh 17 hours ago

    The irony of all this is that unlike humans - which we have no evidence to suggest can directly introspect lower level reasoning processes - LLMs could be given direct access to introspect their own internal state, via tooling. So if we want to, we can make them able to understand and reason about their own thought processes at a level no human can.

    But current LLM's chain of thought is not it.

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bongodongobob a day ago

I didn't think so. I think parent has just misunderstood what chain of thought is and does.

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SkyBelow a day ago

It was, but I wonder to what extent it is based on the idea that a chain of thought in humans shows how we actually think. If you have chain of thought in your head, can you use it to modify what you are seeing, have it operate twice at once, or even have it operate somewhere else in the brain? It is something that exists, but the idea it shows us any insights into how the brain works seems somewhat premature.

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