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by wolfi008 1174 days ago
> Asking the model to think about

These models do not "think". This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how they work. It's not AI. It's not even language. It's just text inference.

3 comments

If you ask the model to "think" about something, and then it simulates that action and outputs what the result of that might be, does it matter if it's really thinking or not? Especially if the output is what we wanted originally?

I would suggest that a person saying "ask the model to think about" in this context in no way implies that that person is confused about the nature of the model, it is simply a convenient piece of language that helps us to achieve the desired result.

> does it matter if it's really thinking or not?

Yes, it does. Assuming GPT "thinks" is shaping public perception and that's already gone much too far.

He did not say "make the model think about..." or implied the model is thinking. He simply and _correctly_ pointed that if you _ask_ the model to think it improves the answer.

It looks you just pattern-matched on the word _think_ and replied with a pre-made opinion about how AIs can't think. Ironic...

Maybe you are asking it to think and it's like, "this is 99% likely just code analysis requested"

So it's still fair to say you can ask it to think