I found the aeticle in a post on the fediverse, and I can’t find it anymore.
The reaserchers asked a simple mathematical question to an LLM ( like 7+4) and then could see how internally it worked by finding similar paths, but nothing like performing mathematical reasoning, even if the final answer was correct.
Then they asked the LLM to explain how it found the result, what was it’s internal reasoning. The answer was detailed step by step mathematical logic, like a human explaining how to perform an addition.
This showed 2 things:
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LLM don’t “know” how they work
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the second answer was a rephrasing of original text used for training that explain how math works, so LLM just used that as an explanation
I think it was a very interesting an meaningful analysis
Can anyone help me find this?
EDIT: thanks to @theunknownmuncher @lemmy.world https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model its this one
EDIT2: I’m aware LLM dont “know” anything and don’t reason, and it’s exactly why I wanted to find the article. Some more details here: https://feddit.it/post/18191686/13815095
Oh wow thank you! That’s it!
I didn’t even remember now good this article was and how many experiments it collected
Here’s a book for a different audience. Explains in layman terms why to be wary about this tech, https://thebullshitmachines.com/
Can’t help but here’s a rant on people asking LLMs to “explain their reasoning” which is impossible because they can never reason (not meant to be attacking OP, just attacking the “LLMs think and reason” people and companies that spout it):
LLMs are just matrix math to complete the most likely next word. They don’t know anything and can’t reason.
Anything you read or hear about LLMs or “AI” getting “asked questions” or “explain its reasoning” or talking about how they’re “thinking” is just AI propaganda to make you think they’re doing something LLMs literally can’t do but people sure wish they could.
In this case it sounds like people who don’t understand how LLMs work eating that propaganda up and approaching LLMs like there’s something to talk to or discern from.
If you waste egregiously high amounts of gigawatts to put everything that’s ever been typed into matrices you can operate on, you get a facsimile of the human knowledge that went into typing all of that stuff.
It’d be impressive if the environmental toll making the matrices and using them wasn’t critically bad.
TLDR; LLMs can never think or reason, anyone talking about them thinking or reasoning is bullshitting, they utilize almost everything that’s ever been typed to give (occasionally) reasonably useful outputs that are the most basic bitch shit because that’s the most likely next word at the cost of environmental disaster
The environmental toll doesn’t have to be that bad. You can get decent results from single high-end gaming GPU.
You can, but the stuff that’s really useful (very competent code completion) needs gigantic context lengths that even rich peeps with $2k GPUs can’t do. And that’s ignoring the training power and hardware costs to get the models.
Techbros chasing VC funding are pushing LLMs to the physical limit of what humanity can provide power and hardware-wise. Way less hype and letting them come to market organically in 5/10 years would give the LLMs a lot more power efficiency at the current context and depth limits. But that ain’t this timeline, we just got VC money looking to buy nuclear plants and fascists trying to subdue the US for the techbro oligarchs womp womp
People don’t understand what “model” means. That’s the unfortunate reality.
They walk down runways and pose for magazines. Do they reason? Sometimes.
But why male models?
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Yeah. That’s because peoples unfortunate reality is a “model”.
I’ve read that article. They used something they called an “MRI for AIs”, and checked e.g. how an AI handled math questions, and then asked the AI how it came to that answer, and the pathways actually differed. While the AI talked about using a textbook answer, it actually did a different approach. That’s what I remember of that article.
But yes, it exists, and it is science, not TicTok
Thank you. I found the article, linkin the OP
How would you prove that someone or something is capable of reasoning or thinking?
You can prove it’s not by doing some matrix multiplication and seeing its matrix multiplication. Much easier way to go about it
Yes, neural networks can be implemented with matrix operations. What does that have to do with proving or disproving the ability to reason? You didn’t post a relevant or complete thought
Your comment is like saying an audio file isn’t really music because it’s just a series of numbers.
Improper comparison; an audio file isn’t the basic action on data, it is the data; the audio codec is the basic action on the data
“An LLM model isn’t really an LLM because it’s just a series of numbers”
But the action of turning the series of numbers into something of value (audio codec for an audio file, matrix math for an LLM) are actions that can be analyzed
And clearly matrix multiplication cannot reason any better than an audio codec algorithm. It’s matrix math, it’s cool we love matrix math. Really big matrix math is really cool and makes real sounding stuff. But it’s just matrix math, that’s how we know it can’t think
LOL you didn’t really make the point you thought you did. It isn’t an “improper comparison” (it’s called a false equivalency FYI), because there isn’t a real distinction between information and this thing you just made up called “basic action on data”, but anyway have it your way:
Your comment is still exactly like saying an audio pipeline isn’t really playing music because it’s actually just doing basic math.
I was channeling the Interstellar docking computer (“improper contact” in such a sassy voice) ;)
There is a distinction between data and an action you perform on data (matrix maths, codec algorithm, etc.). It’s literally completely different.
An audio codec (not a pipeline) is just actually doing math - just like the workings of an LLM. There’s plenty of work to be done after the audio codec decodes the m4a to get to tunes in your ears. Same for an LLM, sandwiching those matrix multiplications that make the magic happen are layers that crunch the prompts and assemble the tokens you see it spit out.
LLMs can’t think, that’s just the fact of how they work. The problem is that AI companies are happy to describe them in terms that make you think they can think to sell their product! I literally cannot be wrong that LLMs cannot think or reason, there’s no room for debate, it’s settled long ago. AI companies will string the LLMs together and let them chew for a while to try make themselves catch when they’re dropping bullshit. It’s still not thinking and reasoning though. They can be useful tools, but LLMs are just tools not sentient or verging on sentient
There is a distinction between data and an action you perform on data (matrix maths, codec algorithm, etc.). It’s literally completely different.
Incorrect. You might want to take an information theory class before speaking on subjects like this.
I literally cannot be wrong that LLMs cannot think or reason, there’s no room for debate, it’s settled long ago.
Lmao yup totally, it’s not like this type of research currently gets huge funding at universities and institutions or anything like that 😂 it’s a dead research field because it’s already “settled”. (You’re wrong 🤭)
LLMs are just tools not sentient or verging on sentient
Correct. No one claimed they are “sentient” (you actually mean “sapient”, not “sentient”, but it’s fine because people commonly mix these terms up. Sentience is about the physical senses. If you can respond to stimuli from your environment, you’re sentient, if you can “I think, therefore I am”, you’re sapient). And no, LLMs are not sapient either, and sapience has nothing to do with neural networks’ ability to mathematically reasoning or logic, you’re just moving the goalpost)
Can humans think?
Do LLMs not exhibit emergent behaviour? But who am I, a simple skin-bag of chemicals, to really say.
They do not, and I, a simple skin-bag of chemicals (mostly water tho) do say
People that can not do Matrix multiplication do not possess the basic concepts of intelligence now? Or is software that can do matrix multiplication intelligent?
So close, LLMs work via matrix multiplication, which is well understood by many meat bags and matrix math can’t think. If a meat bag can’t do matrix math, that’s ok, because the meat bag doesn’t work via matrix multiplication. lol imagine forgetting how to do matrix multiplication and disappearing into a singularity or something
Well, on the other hand. Meat bags can’t really do neuron stuff either, despite that is essential for any meat bag operation. Humans are still here though and so are dogs.
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It’s a developer option that isn’t generally available on consumer-facing products. It’s literally just a debug log that outputs the steps to arrive at a response, nothing more.
It’s not about novel ideation or reasoning (programmatic neural networks don’t do that), but just an output of statistical data that says “Step was 90% certain, Step 2 was 89% certain…etc”
Who has claimed that LLMs have the capacity to reason?
More than enough people who claim to know how it works think it might be “evolving” into a sentient being inside it’s little black box. Example from a conversation I gave up on… https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18759960
I don’t want to brigade, so I’ll put my thoughts here. The linked comment is making the same mistake about self preservation that people make when they ask an LLM to “show it’s work” or explain it’s reasoning. The text response of an LLM cannot be taken at it’s word or used to confirm that kind of theory. It requires tracing the logic under the hood.
Just like how it’s not actually an AI assistant, but trained and prompted to output text that is expected to be what an AI assistant would respond with, if it is expected that it would pursue self preservation, then it will output text that matches that. It’s output is always “fake”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a real potential element of self preservation, though, but you’d need to dig and trace through the network to show it, not use the text output.
Maybe I should rephrase my question:
Outside of comment sections on the internet, who has claimed or is claiming that LLMs have the capacity to reason?
The study being referenced explains in detail why they can’t. So I’d say it’s Anthropic who stated LLMs don’t have the capacity to reason, and that’s what we’re discussing.
The popular media tends to go on and on about conflating AI with AGI and synthetic reasoning.
You’re confusing the confirmation that the LLM cannot explain it’s under-the-hood reasoning as text output, with a confirmation of not being able to reason at all. Anthropic is not claiming that it cannot reason. They actually find that it performs complex logic and behavior like planning ahead.
No, they really don’t. It’s a large language model. Input cues instruct it as to which weighted path through the matrix to take. Those paths are complex enough that the human mind can’t hold all the branches and weights at the same time. But there’s no planning going on; the model can’t backtrack a few steps, consider different outcomes and run a meta analysis. Other reasoning models can do that, but not language models; language models are complex predictive translators.
To write the second line, the model had to satisfy two constraints at the same time: the need to rhyme (with “grab it”), and the need to make sense (why did he grab the carrot?). Our guess was that Claude was writing word-by-word without much forethought until the end of the line, where it would make sure to pick a word that rhymes. We therefore expected to see a circuit with parallel paths, one for ensuring the final word made sense, and one for ensuring it rhymes.
Instead, we found that Claude plans ahead. Before starting the second line, it began “thinking” of potential on-topic words that would rhyme with “grab it”. Then, with these plans in mind, it writes a line to end with the planned word.
🙃 actually read the research?
No, they’re right. The “research” is biased by the company that sells the product and wants to hype it. Many layers don’t make think or reason, but they’re glad to put them in quotes that they hope peeps will forget were there.
It’s true that LLMs aren’t “aware” of what internal steps they are taking, so asking an LLM how they reasoned out an answer will just output text that statistically sounds right based on its training set, but to say something like “they can never reason” is provably false.
Its obvious that you have a bias and desperately want reality to confirm it, but there’s been significant research and progress in tracing internals of LLMs, that show logic, planning, and reasoning.
EDIT: lol you can downvote me but it doesn’t change evidence based research
It’d be impressive if the environmental toll making the matrices and using them wasn’t critically bad.
Developing a AAA video game has a higher carbon footprint than training an LLM, and running inference uses significantly less power than playing that same video game.
Too deep on the AI propaganda there, it’s completing the next word. You can give the LLM base umpteen layers to make complicated connections, still ain’t thinking.
The LLM corpos trying to get nuclear plants to power their gigantic data centers while AAA devs aren’t trying to buy nuclear plants says that’s a straw man and you simultaneously also are wrong.
Using a pre-trained and memory-crushed LLM that can run on a small device won’t take up too much power. But that’s not what you’re thinking of. You’re thinking of the LLM only accessible via ChatGPT’s api that has a yuge context length and massive matrices that needs hilariously large amounts of RAM and compute power to execute. And it’s still a facsimile of thought.
It’s okay they suck and have very niche actual use cases - maybe it’ll get us to something better. But they ain’t gold, they ain’t smart, and they ain’t worth destroying the planet.
it’s completing the next word.
Facts disagree, but you’ve decided to live in a reality that matches your biases despite real evidence, so whatever 👍
It’s literally tokens. Doesn’t matter if it completes the next word or next phrase, still completing the next most likely token 😎😎 can’t think can’t reason can witch’s brew facsimile of something done before
Why aren’t they tokens when you use them? Does your brain not also choose the most apt selection for the sequence to make maximal meaning in the context prompted? I assert that after a sufficiently complex obfuscation of the underlying mathematical calculations the concept of reasoning becomes an exercise in pedantic dissection of the mutual interpretation of meaning. Our own minds are objectively deterministic, but the obfuscation provided by lack of direct observation provides the quantum cover fire needed to claim we are not just LLM equivalent representation on biological circuit boards.
but there’s been significant research and progress in tracing internals of LLMs, that show logic, planning, and reasoning.
would there be a source for such research?
https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model for one, the exact article OP was asking for
but this article espouses that llms do the opposite of logic, planning, and reasoning?
quoting:
Claude, on occasion, will give a plausible-sounding argument designed to agree with the user rather than to follow logical steps. We show this by asking it for help on a hard math problem while giving it an incorrect hint. We are able to “catch it in the act” as it makes up its fake reasoning,
are there any sources which show that llms use logic, conduct planning, and reason (as was asserted in the 2nd level comment)?
No, you’re misunderstanding the findings. It does show that LLMs do not explain their reasoning when asked, which makes sense and is expected. They do not have access to their inner-workings and generate a response that “sounds” right, but tracing their internal logic shows they operate differently than what they claim, when asked. You can’t ask an LLM to explain its own reasoning. But the article shows how they’ve made progress with tracing under-the-hood, and the surprising results they found about how it is able to do things like plan ahead, which defeats the misconception that it is just “autocomplete”
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ollama is not an LLM, but a program used to run them. What model are you running?
Yes I’m well aware thank you.
Gemma3 was latest when I installed it.
I’ve been very unimpressed by gemma3. 1b, 4b, 12b? 27b is probably your best chance at coherent results. Try qwen3:32b
I don’t know how I work. I couldn’t tell you much about neuroscience beyond “neurons are linked together and somehow that creates thoughts”. And even when it comes to complex thoughts, I sometimes can’t explain why. At my job, I often lean on intuition I’ve developed over a decade. I can look at a system and get an immediate sense if it’s going to work well, but actually explaining why or why not takes a lot more time and energy. Am I an LLM?
I agree. This is the exact problem I think people need to face with nural network AIs. They work the exact same way we do. Even if we analysed the human brain it would look like wires connected to wires with different resistances all over the place with some other chemical influences.
I think everyone forgets that nural networks were used in AI to replicate how animal brains work, and clearly if it worked for us to get smart then it should work for something synthetic. Well we’ve certainly answered that now.
Everyone being like “oh it’s just a predictive model and it’s all math and math can’t be intelligent” are questioning exactly how their own brains work. We are just prediction machines, the brain releases dopamine when it correctly predicts things, it self learns from correctly assuming how things work. We modelled AI off of ourselves. And if we don’t understand how we work, of course we’re not gonna understand how it works.
They work the exact same way we do.
Two things being difficult to understand does not mean that they are the exact same.
Maybe work is the wrong word, same output. Just as a belt and chain drive does the same thing, or how fluorescent, incandescent or LED lights produce light even though they’re completely different mechanisms.
What I was saying is that one is based on the other, so similar problems like irrational thought even if the right answer is conjured shouldn’t be surprising. Although an animal brain and nural network are not the same, the broad concept of how they work is.
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I agree. This is the exact problem I think people need to face with nural network AIs. They work the exact same way we do.
I don’t think this is a fair way of summarizing it. You’re making it sound like we have AGI, which we do not have AGI and we may never have AGI.
Let’s get something straight, no I’m not saying we have our modern definition of AGI but we’ve practically got the original definition coined before LLMs were a thing. Which was that the proposed AGI agent should maximise “the ability to satisfy goals in a wide range of environments”. I personally think we’ve just moved the goal posts a bit.
Wether we’ll ever have thinking, rationalised and possibly conscious AGI is beyond the question. But I do think current AI is similar to existing brains today.
Do you not agree that animal brains are just prediction machines?
That we have our own hallucinations all the time? Think visual tricks, lapses in memory, deja vu, or just the many mental disorders people can have.
Do you think our brain doesn’t follow path of least resistance in processing? Or do you think our thoughts comes from elsewhere?
I seriously don’t think animal brains or human to be specific are that special that nurural networks are beneath. Sure people didn’t like being likened to animals but it was the truth, and I as do many AI researches, liken us to AI.
AI is primitive now, yet it can still pass the bar, doctors exams, compute complex physics problems and write a book (soulless as it may be like some authors) in less than a few seconds.
Whilst we may not have AGI the question was about math. The paper questioned how it did 36+59 and it did things in an interesting way where it half predicted what the tens column would be and ‘knew’ what the units column was, then put it together. Although thats not how I or even you may do it there are probably people who do it similar.
All I argue is that AI is closer to how our brains think, and with our brains being irrational quite often it shouldn’t be surprising that AI nural networks are also irrational at times.
“the ability to satisfy goals in a wide range of environments”
That was not the definition of AGI even back before LLMs were a thing.
Wether we’ll ever have thinking, rationalised and possibly conscious AGI is beyond the question. But I do think current AI is similar to existing brains today.
That’s doing a disservice to AGI.
Do you not agree that animal brains are just prediction machines?
That’s doing a disservice to human brains. Humans are sentient, LLMs are not sentient.
I don’t really agree with you.
LLMs are damn impressive, but they are very clearly not AGI, and I think that’s always worth pointing out.
The first person to be recorded talking about AGI was Mark Gubrud. He made that quote above, here’s another:
The major theme of the book was to develop a mathematical foundation of artificial intelligence. This is not an easy task since intelligence has many (often ill-defined) faces. More specifically, our goal was to develop a theory for rational agents acting optimally in any environment. Thereby we touched various scientific areas, including reinforcement learning, algorithmic information theory, Kolmogorov complexity, computational complexity theory, information theory and statistics, Solomonoff induction, Levin search, sequential decision theory, adaptive control theory, and many more. Page 232 8.1.1 Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability
As UGI largely encompasses AGI we could easily argue that if modern LLMs are beginning to fit the description of UGI then it’s fullfilling AGI too. Although AGI’s definition in more recent times has become more nuanced to replicating a human brain instead, I’d argue that that would degrade the AI trying to replicate biology.
I don’t beleive it’s a disservice to AGI because AGI’s goal is to create machines with human-level intelligence. But current AI is set to surpase collective human intelligence supposedly by the end of the decade.
And it’s not a disservice to biological brains to summarise them to prediction machines. They work, very clearly. Sentience or not if you simulated every atom in the brain it will likely do the same job, soul or no soul. It just brings the philosophical question of “do we have free will or not?” And “is physics deterministic or not”. So much text exists on the brain being prediction machines and the only time it has recently been debated is when someone tries differing us from AI.
I don’t believe LLMs are AGI yet either, I think we’re very far away from AGI. In a lot of ways I suspect we’ll skip AGI and go for UGI instead. My firm opinion is that biological brains are just not effective enough. Our brains developed to survive the natural world and I don’t think AI needs that to surpass us. I think UGI will be the equivalent of our intelligence with the fat cut off. I believe it only resembles our irrational thought patterns now because the fat hasn’t been striped yet but if something truely intelligent emerges, we’ll probably see these irrational patterns cease to exist.
LLMs among other things lack the whole neurotransmitter “live” regulation aspect and plasticity of the brain.
We are nowhere near a close representation of actual brains. LLMs to brains are like a horse carriage compared to modern cars. Yes they have four wheels and they move, and cars also need four wheels and move, but that is far from being close to each other.
So LLMs are like a human with anterograde amnesia. They’re like Dory.
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Formatting might be off on some of these, had to convert some papers to text as some were only scanned and I couldn’t be bothered writing it all out by hand:
“The PDP models are inspired by the structure and function of the brain. In particular, they are based on networks of neuron-like units whose interactions resemble those among neurons in the cerebral cortex.” Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition McClelland, Rumelhart, & the PDP Research Group
“The design of artificial neural networks was inspired by knowledge of the brain, in particular the way biological neurons are interconnected and the way they communicate through synapses.” Deep Learning LeCun, Bengio, Hinton
“The design of deep learning architectures owes much to our understanding of the hierarchical structure of the visual cortex, particularly as revealed by Hubel and Wiesel’s work on simple and complex cells.” Neuroscience-Inspired Artificial Intelligence Hassabis et al.
“The relationship between biological and artificial neural networks has now become a central issue in both neuroscience and AI. Deep networks trained with backpropagation may offer a plausible model of some aspects of human cognition.” Cognitive computational neuroscience Kriegeskorte & Douglas (2018)
“Goal-driven deep learning models, when trained to solve behavioral tasks, can develop internal representations that match those found in the brain.” Using goal-driven deep learning models to understand sensory cortex Yamins & DiCarlo
And longer excepts on the similarities of AI neural networks to biological brains, more specifically human children, in the pursuit of study with improving learning and education development. Super interesting papers that are easily accessible to anyone:
“Humans are imperfect reasoners. We reason most effectively about entities and situations that are consistent with our understanding of the world. Our experiments show that language models mirror these patterns of behavior. Language models perform imperfectly on logical reasoning tasks, but this performance depends on content and context. Most notably, such models often fail in situations where humans fail — when stimuli become too abstract or conflict with prior understanding of the world. Beyond these parallels, we also observed reasoning effects in language models that to our knowledge have not been previously investigated in the human literature. For example, the patterns of errors on the ‘violate realistic’ rules, or the relative ease of ‘shuffled realistic’ rules in the Wason tasks. Likewise, language model performance on the Wason tasks increases most when they are demonstrated with realistic examples; benefits of concrete examples have been found in cognitive and educational contexts (Sweller et al., 1998; Fyfe et al., 2014), but remain to be explored in the Wason problems. Investigating whether humans show similar effects is a promising direction for future research.” 5.9-10 Language models show human-like content effects on reasoning Ishita Dasgupta*,1, Andrew K. Lampinen*,1, Stephanie C. Y. Chan1, Antonia Creswell1, Dharshan Kumaran1, James L. McClelland1,2 and Felix Hill1 *Equal contributions, listed alphabetically, 1DeepMind, 2Stanford University
“In this article we will point out several characteristics of human cognitive processes that conventional computer architectures do not capture well. Then we will note that connectionist models {neural networks} are much better able to capture these aspects of human processing. After that we will mention three recent applications in connectionist artificial intelligence which exploit these characteristics. Thus, we shall see that connectionist models offer hope of overcoming the limitations of conventional AI. The paper ends with an example illustrating how connectionist models can change our basic conceptions of the nature of intelligent processing.”
“The framework for building connectionist models is laid out in detail in Rumelhart, McClelland and the PDP Group (1986), and many examples of models constructed in that framework are described. Two examples of connectionist models of human processing abilities that capture these characteristics are the interactive activation model of visual word recognition from McClelland and Rumelhart (1981), and the model of past tense learning from Rumelhart and McClelland (1986). These models were motivated by psychological experiments, and were constructed to capture the data found in these studies. We describe them here to illustrate some of the roots of the connectionist approach in an attempt to understand detailed aspects of human cognition.”
“The models just reviewed capture important aspects of data from psychological experiments, and illustrate how the characteristics of human processing capabilities enumerated above can be captured in an explicit comptutational framework. Recently connectionist models that capture these same characteristics have begun to give rise to a new kind of Artificial Intelligence, which we will call connectionist AI. Connectionist AI is beginning to address several topics that have not been easily solved using other approaches. We will consider three cases of this. In each case we will describe recent progress that illustrates the ability of connectionist networks to capture the characteristics of human performance mentioned above.”
“This paper began with the idea that humans exploit graded information, and that computational mechanisms that aim to emulate the natural processing capabilities of humans should exploit this kind of information as well. Connectionist models do exploit graded information, and this gives them many of their attractive characteristics.” Parallel Distributed Processing: Bridging the Gap Between Human and Machine Intelligence James L. McClelland, Axel Cleeremans, and David Servan-Schreiber Carnegie Mellon University
“Artificial neural networks have come and gone and come again- and there are several good reasons to think that this time they will be around for quite a while. Cheng and Titterington have done an excellent job describing that nature of neural network models and their relations to statistical methods, and they have overviewed several applications. They have also suggested why neuroscientists interested in modeling the human brain are interested in such models. In this note, I will point out some additional motivations for the investigation of neural networks. These are motivations arising from the effort to capture key aspects of human cognition and learning that have thus far eluded cognitive science. A central goal of congnitive science is to understand the full range of human cognitive function”…“{there are} good reasons for thinking that artificial neural networks, or at least computationally explicit models that capture key properties of such networks, will play an important role in the effort to capture some of the aspects of human cognitive function that have eluded symbolic approaches.” Neural Networks: A Review from Statistical Perspective]: Comment: Neural Networks and Cognitive Science: Motivations and Applications James L. McClelland Statistical Science, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Feb., 1994), pp. 42-45.
“The idea has arisen that as the scale of experience and computation begins to approach the scale of experience and computation available to a young child—who sees millions of images and hears millions of words per year, and whose brain contains 10–100 billion neuron-like processing units each updating their state on a time scale of milliseconds—the full power and utility of neural networks to capture natural computation is finally beginning to become a reality, allowing artificially intelligent systems to capture more fully the capabilities of the natural intelligence present in real biological networks in the brain.”
“One major development in the last 25 years has been the explosive growth of computational cognitive neuroscience. The idea that computer simulations of neural mechanisms might yield insight into cognitive phenomena no longer requires, at least in most quarters, vigorous defense—there now exist whole fields, journals, and conferences dedicated to this pursuit. One consequence is the elaboration of a variety of different computationally rigorous approaches to neuroscience and cognition that capture neural information processing mechanisms at varying degrees of abstraction and complexity. These include the dynamic field theory, in which the core representational elements are fields of neurons whose activity and interactions can be expressed as a series of coupled equations (Johnson, Spencer, & Sch€oner, 2008); the neural engineering framework, which seeks to understand how spiking neurons might implement tensor-product approaches to symbolic representations (Eliasmith & Anderson, 2003; Rasmussen & Eliasmith, 2011); and approaches to neural representation based on ideal-observer models and probabilistic inference (Deneve, Latham, & Pouget, 1999; Knill & Pouget, 2004). Though these perspectives differ from PDP in many respects, all of these efforts share the idea that cognition emerges from interactions among populations of neurons whose function can be studied in simplified, abstract form.” Parallel Distributed Processing at 25: Further Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition T. T. Rogers, J. L. McClelland / Cognitive Science 38 (2014) p1062-1063
“In this paper, a simple neural network model will be used to simulate the development of children’s ability to solve equivalence problems. The model treats algebraic problem solving as an acquired skill, emerging slowly from practice solving example problems… In summary, a recurrent neural network can serve as a useful model of how we learn mathematical equivalence… We investigated the strategies of the model, and found that it adopted an add-all strategy like many children do before mastering equivalence problems” A neural network model of learning mathematical equivalence Kevin W. Mickey, James L. McClelland
“We explore a recurrent neural network model of counting based on the differentiable recurrent attentional model of Gregor et al. (2015). Our results reveal that the model can learn to count the number of items in a display, pointing to each of the items in turn and producing the next item in the count sequence at each step, then saying ‘done’ when there are no more blobs to count. The model thus demonstrates that the ability to learn to count does not depend on special knowledge relevant to the counting task. We find that the model’s ability to count depends on how well it has learned to point to each successive item in the array, underscoring the importance of coordination of the visuospatial act of pointing with the recitation of the count list… Yet the errors that it makes have similarities with the patterns seen in human children’s counting errors, consistent with idea that children rely on graded and somewhat variable mechanisms similar to our neural networks.” Can a Recurrent Neural Network Learn to Count Things? Mengting Fang, Zhenglong Zhou, Sharon Y. Chen, James L. McClelland
“Over the course of development, humans learn myriad facts about items in the world, and naturally group these items into useful categories and structures. This semantic knowledge is essential for diverse behaviors and inferences in adulthood. How is this richly structured semantic knowledge acquired, organized, deployed, and represented by neuronal networks in the brain? We address this question by studying how the nonlinear learning dynamics of deep linear networks acquires information about complex environmental structures. Our results show that this deep learning dynamics can self-organize emergent hidden representations in a manner that recapitulates many empirical phenomena in human semantic development. Such deep networks thus provide a mathematically tractable window into the development of internal neural representations through experience.” “In addition to matching neural similarity patterns across subjects, experiments using fMRI and single-unit responses have also documented a correspondence between neural similarity patterns and behavioral similarity patterns (21).” A mathematical theory of semantic development in deep neural networks Andrew M. Saxe, James L. McClelland, and Surya Ganguli
I personally think there are plenty of examples out there in neuroscience and computer science papers let alone what other fields are starting to discover with the use of AI. In my opinion it should be of no surprise and quite clear how replicating a mechanism of self-adapting logic would create behaviours that we can find directly within ourselves.
Let me know if this is enough to prove my point, but I think I’m tired of reading papers for a bit.
Even if LLM “neurons” and their interconnections are modeled to the biological ones, LLMs aren’t modeled on human brain, where a lot is not understood.
The first thing is that how the neurons are organized is completely different. Think about the cortex and the transformer.
Second is the learning process. Nowhere close.
The fact explained in the article about how we do math, through logical steps while LLMs use resemblance is a small but meaningful example. And it also shows that you can see how LLMs work, it’s just very difficult
I agree, but I’m not sure it matters when it comes to the big questions, like “what separates us from the LLMs?” Answering that basically amounts to answering “what does it mean to be human?”, which has been stumping philosophers for millennia.
It’s true that artificial neurons are significant different than biological ones, but are biological neurons what make us human? I’d argue no. Animals have neurons, so are they human? Also, if we ever did create a brain simulation that perfectly replicated someone’s brain down to the cellular level, and that simulation behaved exactly like the original, I would characterize that as a human.
It’s also true LLMs can’t learn, but there are plenty of people with anterograde amnesia that can’t either.
This feels similar to the debates about what separates us from other animal species. It used to be thought that humans were qualitatively different than other species by virtue of our use of tools, language, and culture. Then it was discovered that plenty of other animals use tools, have language, and something resembling a culture. These discoveries were ridiculed by many throughout the 20th century, even by scientists, because they wanted to keep believing humans are special in some qualitative way. I see the same thing happening with LLMs.
You’re definitely overselling how AI works and underselling how human brains work here, but there is a kernel of truth to what you’re saying.
Neural networks are a biomimicry technology. They explicitly work by mimicking how our own neurons work, and surprise surprise, they create eerily humanlike responses.
The thing is, LLMs don’t have anything close to reasoning the way human brains reason. We are actually capable of understanding and creating meaning, LLMs are not.
So how are they human-like? Our brains are made up of many subsystems, each doing extremely focussed, specific tasks.
We have so many, including sound recognition, speech recognition, language recognition. Then on the flipside we have language planning, then speech planning and motor centres dedicated to creating the speech sounds we’ve planned to make. The first three get sound into your brain and turn it into ideas, the last three take ideas and turn them into speech.
We have made neural network versions of each of these systems, and even tied them together. An LLM is analogous to our brain’s language planning centre. That’s the part that decides how to put words in sequence.
That’s why LLMs sound like us, they sequence words in a very similar way.
However, each of these subsystems in our brains can loop-back on themselves to check the output. I can get my language planner to say “mary sat on the hill”, then loop that through my language recognition centre to see how my conscious brain likes it. My consciousness might notice that “the hill” is wrong, and request new words until it gets “a hill” which it believes is more fitting. It might even notice that “mary” is the wrong name, and look for others, it might cycle through martha, marge, maths, maple, may, yes, that one. Okay, “may sat on a hill”, then send that to the speech planning centres to eventually come out of my mouth.
Your brain does this so much you generally don’t notice it happening.
In the 80s there was a craze around so called “automatic writing”, which was essentially zoning out and just writing whatever popped into your head without editing. You’d get fragments of ideas and really strange things, often very emotionally charged, they seemed like they were coming from some mysterious place, maybe ghosts, demons, past lives, who knows? It was just our internal LLM being given free rein, but people got spooked into believing it was a real person, just like people think LLMs are people today.
In reality we have no idea how to even start constructing a consciousness. It’s such a complex task and requires so much more linking and understanding than just a probabilistic connection between words. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were more than a century away from AGI.
Maybe I am over selling current AI and underselling our brains. But the way I see it is that the exact mechanism that allowed intelligence to flourish within ourselves exists with current nural networks. They are nowhere near being AGI or UGI yet but I think these tools alone are all that are required.
The way I see it is, if we rewound the clock far enough we would see primitive life with very basic nural networks beginning to develop in existing multicellular life (something like jellyfish possibly). These nural networks made from neurons neurotransmitters and synapses or possibly something more primitive would begin forming the most basic of logic over centuries of evolution. But it wouldn’t reassemble anything close to reason or intelligence, it wouldn’t have eyes, ears or any need for language. At first it would probably spend its first million years just trying to control movement.
We know that this process would have started from nothing, nural networks with no training data, just a free world to explore. And yet over 500 million years later here we are.
My argument is that modern nural networks work the same way that biological brains do, at least the mechanism does. The only technical difference is with neurotransmitters and the various dampening and signal boosting that can happen along with nuromodulation. Given enough time and enough training, I firmly believe nural networks could develop reason. And given external sensors it could develop thought from these input signals.
I don’t think we would need to develop a consciousness for it but that it would develop one itself given enough time to train on its own.
A large hurdle that might arguably be a good thing, is that we are largely in control of the training. When AI is used it does not learn and alter itself, only memorising things currently. But I do remember a time when various AI researchers allowed earlier models to self learn, however the internet being the internet, it developed some wildly bad habits.
If all you’re saying is that neural networks could develop consciousness one day, sure, and nothing I said contradicts that. Our brains are neural networks, so it stands to reason they could do what our brains can do. But the technical hurdles are huge.
You need at least two things to get there:
- Enough computing power to support it.
- Insight into how consciousness is structured.
1 is hard because a single brain alone is about as powerful as a significant chunk of worldwide computing, the gulf between our current power and what we would need is about… 100% of what we would need. We are so woefully under resourced for that. You also need to solve how to power the computers without cooking the planet, which is not something we’re even close to solving currently.
2 means that we can’t just throw more power or training at the problem. Modern NN modules have an underlying theory that makes them work. They’re essentially statistical curve-fitting machines. We don’t currently have a good theoretical model that would allow us to structure the NN to create a consciousness. It’s not even on the horizon yet.
Those are two enormous hurdles. I think saying modern NN design can create consciousness is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we can get to the Moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made in the last few years”.
Moon rockets are essentially artillery science in many ways, yes, but Jules Verne was still a century away in terms of supporting technologies, raw power, and essential insights into how to do it.
We’re on the same page about consciousness then. My original comment only pointed out that current AI have problems that we have because they replicate how we work and it seems that people don’t like recognising that very obvious fact that we have the exact problems that LLMs have. LLMs aren’t rational because we inherently are not rational. That was the only point I was originally trying to make.
For AGI or UGI to exist, massive hurdles will need to be made, likely an entire restructuring of it. I think LLMs will continue to get smarter and likely exceed us but it will not be perfect without a massive rework.
Personally and this is pure speculation, I wouldn’t be surprised if AGI or UGI is only possible with the help of a highly advanced AI. Similar to how microbiologist are only now starting to unravel protein synthesis with the help of AI. I think the shear volume of data that needs processing requires something like a highly evolved AI to understand, and that current technology is purely a stepping stone for something more.
We don’t have the same problems LLMs have.
LLMs have zero fidelity. They have no - none - zero - model of the world to compare their output to.
Humans have biases and problems in our thinking, sure, but we’re capable of at least making corrections and working with meaning in context. We can recognise our model of the world and how it relates to the things we are saying.
LLMs cannot do that job, at all, and they won’t be able to until they have a model of the world. A model of the world would necessarily include themselves, which is self-awareness, which is AGI. That’s a meaning-understander. Developing a world model is the same problem as consciousness.
What I’m saying is that you cannot develop fidelity at all without AGI, so no, LLMs don’t have the same problems we do. That is an entirely different class of problem.
Some moon rockets fail, but they don’t have that in common with moon cannons. One of those can in theory achieve a moon landing and the other cannot, ever, in any iteration.
It’s the anthropic article you are looking for, where they performed open brain surgery equivalent to find out that they do maths in very strange and eerily humanlike operations, like they will estimate, then if it goes over calculate the last digit like I do. It sucks as a counting technique though
By design, they don’t know how they work. It’s interesting to see this experimentally proven, but it was already known. In the same way the predictive text function on your phone keyboard doesn’t know how it works.
I’m aware of this and agree but:
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I see that asking how an LLM got to their answers as a “proof” of sound reasoning has become common
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this new trend of “reasoning” models, where an internal conversation is shown in all its steps, seems to be based on this assumption of trustable train of thoughts. And given the simple experiment I mentioned, it is extremely dangerous and misleading
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take a look at this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM : everything is based on observing and directing this internal reasoning, and these guys are computer scientists. How can they trust this?
So having a good written article at hand is a good idea imho
I only follow some YouTubers like Digital Spaceport but there has been a lot of progress from years ago when LLM’s were only predictive. They now have an inductive engine attached to the LLM to provide logic guard rails.
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Define “know”.
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An LLM can have text describing how it works and be trained on that text and respond with an answer incorporating that.
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LLMs have no intrinsic ability to “sense” what’s going on inside them, nor even a sense of time. It’s just not an input to their state. You can build neural-net-based systems that do have such an input, but ChatGPT or whatever isn’t that.
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LLMs lack a lot of the mechanisms that I would call essential to be able to solve problems in a generalized way. While I think Dijkstra had a valid point:
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
…and we shouldn’t let our prejudices about how a mind “should” function internally cloud how we treat artificial intelligence…it’s also true that we can look at an LLM and say that it just fundamentally doesn’t have the ability to do a lot of things that a human-like mind can. An LLM is, at best, something like a small part of our mind. While extracting it and playing with it in isolation can produce some interesting results, there’s a lot that it can’t do on its own: it won’t, say, engage in goal-oriented behavior. Asking a chatbot questions that require introspection and insight on its part won’t yield interesting result, because it can’t really engage in introspection or insight to any meaningful degree. It has very little mutable state, unlike your mind.
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There was a study by Anthropic, the company behind Claude, that developed another AI that they used as a sort of “brain scanner” for the LLM, in the sense that allowed them to see sort of a model of how the LLM “internal process” worked
Yes, that’s it. I added the link in the OP,
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“Researchers” did a thing I did the first day I was actually able to ChatGPT and came to a conclusion that is in the disclaimers on the ChatGPT website. Can I get paid to do this kind of “research?” If you’ve even read a cursory article about how LLMs work you’d know that asking them what their reasoning is for anything doesn’t work because the answer would just always be an explanation of how LLMs work generally.
Very arrogant answer. Good that you have intuition, but the article is serious, especially given how LLMs are used today. The link to it is in the OP now, but I guess you already know everything…