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by antonvs
46 days ago
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> it’s trivial to show that humans do not need language to do mental tasks LLMs don't need language to do mental tasks, either. Their input and output is language - like humans - but in between, the high-dimensional vector representations (often loosely called latent space) are not language in any meaningful sense. LLMs can benefit from "thinking out loud" much as humans can. The issue is not whether the supposed "thoughts" are actually representative on any "internal" thoughts, but rather that explicating the problem in more detail can help reach better conclusions. One point I was making is that the idea that humans are doing something "special" (or in the OP comment's terms, "real") in this area isn't well-supported, in fact there's plenty of evidence against it. |
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The two processes aren't equivalent. An LLM that fills the thinking trace with a meaningless placeholder token will still exhibit improved performance. There are also regularly things in the thinking trace that don't match the final output if you look closely but on the surface they appear convincing.
It's largely a trained performance. If you go in with the erroneous expectation that it accurately reflects the underlying thought process then you're likely to come away with faulty conclusions.