LLMs can’t reason — they just crib reasoning-like steps from their training data

https://awful.systems/post/2610681

LLMs can’t reason — they just crib reasoning-like steps from their training data - awful.systems

When you ask an LLM a reasoning question. You’re not expecting it to think for you, you’re expecting that it has crawled multiple people asking semantically the same question and getting semantically the same answer, from other people, that are now encoded in its vectors.

That’s why you can ask it. because it encodes semantics.

Paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, LLMs don’t give you information; they give you information shaped sentences.

They don’t encode semantics. They encode the statistical likelihood that each token will follow a given sequence of tokens.

It’s worth pointing out that it does happen to reconstruct information remarkably well considering it’s just likelihood. They’re pretty useful tools like any other, it’s funny ofc to watch silicon valley stumble all over each other chasing the next smartphone.
“remarkably well” as long as the remark is “this is still garbage!”
Anything in particular the LLMs are bad at?
The only remarkable thing is how fucking easy it is to convince the median consumer that vaguely-correct-shape sentences are correct.

It was all lost long before the LLMs when people took random schizo opinions on Facebook as gospel.

We live in a post-truth world, and all things considered I’m not too fussed about LLMs being fallible on occasion when the average person is wrong far more.