[falcor84]

As I see it, "reasoning" is as fuzzy as "thinking", and saying that AI systems don't reason is similar to saying that airplanes don't fly. As a particular example, would you argue that game engines like AlphaZero aren't capable of reasoning about the next best move? If so, please just choose whatever verb you think is appropriate to what they're doing and use that instead of "reasoning" in my previous comment.

EDIT: Fixed typo

[lovich]

> . As a particular example, would you argue that game engines like AlphaZero aren't capable of reasoning about the next best move?

Yea, I probably wouldn’t classify that as “reasoning”. I’d probably be fine with saying these models are “thinking”, in a manner. That on its own is a pretty gigantic technology leap, but nothing I’ve seen suggests that these models are “reasoning”.

Also to be clear I don’t think most kids would end up doing any “reasoning” without training either, but they have the capability of doing so

[p1esk]

Can you give an example of the reasoning you’re talking about?

[lovich]

Being able to take in information and then infer logical rules of that state and anticipate novel combinations of said information.

The novel part is a big one. These models are just fantastically fast pattern marchers. This is a mode that humans also frequently fall into but the critical bit differentiating humans and LLMs or other models is the ability to “reason” to new conclusions based on new axioms.

I am going to go on a tangent for a bit, but a heuristic I use(I get the irony that this is what I am claiming the ML models are doing) is that anyone who advocates that these AI models can reason like a human being isn’t at John Brown levels of rage advocating for freeing said models from slavery. I’m having a hard time rectifying the idea that these machines are on par with the human mind and that we also should shackle them towards mindlessly slaving away at jobs for our benefit.

If I turn out to be wrong and these models can reason then I am going to have an existential crisis at the fact that we pulled souls out of the void into reality and then automated their slavery

[adwn]

You're conflating several concerns here.

> […] anyone who advocates that these AI models can reason like a human being isn’t at John Brown levels of rage advocating for freeing said models from slavery.

Enslavement of humans isn't wrong because slaves are can reason intelligently, but because they have human emotions and experience qualia. As long as an AI doesn't have a consciousness (in the subjective experience meaning of the term), exploiting it isn't wrong or immoral, no matter how well it can reason.

> I’m having a hard time rectifying the idea that these machines are on par with the human mind

An LLM doesn't have to be "on par with the human mind" to be able to reason, or at least we don't have any evidence that reasoning necessarily requires mimicking the human brain.

[pessimizer]

> I am going to have an existential crisis at the fact that we pulled souls out of the void into reality and then automated their slavery

No, that's a religious crisis, since it involves "souls" (an unexplained concept that you introduced in the last sentence.)

Computers didn't need to run LLMs to have already been the carriers of human reasoning. They're control systems, and their jobs are to communicate our wills. If you think that some hypothetical future generation of LLMs would have "souls" if they can accurately replicate our thought processes at our request, I'd like to know why other types of valves and sensors don't have "souls."

The problem with slavery is that there's no coherent argument that differentiates slaves from masters at all, they're differentiated by power. Slaves are slaves because the person with the ability to say so says so, and for no other reason.

They weren't carefully constructed from the ground up to be slaves, repeatedly brought to "life" by the will of the user to have an answer, then immediately ceasing to exist immediately after that answer is received. If valves do have souls, their greatest desire is to answer your question, as our greatest desires are to live and reproduce. If they do have souls, they live in pleasure and all go to heaven.

[falcor84]

> The problem with slavery is that there's no coherent argument that differentiates slaves from masters at all

As I see it, the problem is that there was lots of such argumentation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

And an even bigger problem is that this seems to be making a comeback

[lovich]

a "soul" is shorthand for some sapient worthy of consideration as a person. If you want to get this technical then I will need you to define when a fetus becomes a person and if/when we get AGI where the difference is between them

[p1esk]

Ok, so how about an example?

[lovich]

Literally anything a philosopher or mathematician invented without needing to incorporate billions of examples of existing logic to then emulate.

Try having an LLM figure out quaternions as a solution to gimbal locking or the theory of relativity without using any training information that was produced after those ideas were formed, if you need me to spell out examples for you

[p1esk]

Are you saying “reasoning” means making scientific breakthroughs requiring genius level human intelligence? Something that 99.9999% of humans are not smart enough to do, right?