the categories i like to use to describe what llms are capable and incapable of are: instrumental reason, which is reason as a tool for achieving a goal; and objective reason, which is reasoning about which goals are good or bad, or worth pursuing.
llms are, i think, approaching or have achieved better-than-human performance on the former category in a wide variety of applications.
the latter, not so. leaving aside that there are schools which claim (dogmatically, imho) humans don't or can't engage in objective reason, i dont believe llms are structurally capable of it. their goals can only be imposed on them from outside, coming from prompts, implicit value assumptions in training data, loss function, and rlhf. there is something about human interior experience of an objectively existing world that lets is evaluate true/false/good/bad in a way that is unique to humans among other animals.
llms can't do it. i dont just mean on ethical, epistemic, or aesthetic judgements, but even in practical circumstances like the ones engineers encounter. the reason engineers still have to work alongside llms, even though lllms are (imho) far better programmers and technicians, is that even when given a goal, there is always a graph of evaluations that lead to that objective and llms routinely fail to evaluate the tradeoffs and land in states in outcome space that are subtly (or not so subtly) wrong, even though the objective is complete!
EarthBlues · · focus · HN ↗
the categories i like to use to describe what llms are capable and incapable of are: instrumental reason, which is reason as a tool for achieving a goal; and objective reason, which is reasoning about which goals are good or bad, or worth pursuing.
llms are, i think, approaching or have achieved better-than-human performance on the former category in a wide variety of applications.
the latter, not so. leaving aside that there are schools which claim (dogmatically, imho) humans don't or can't engage in objective reason, i dont believe llms are structurally capable of it. their goals can only be imposed on them from outside, coming from prompts, implicit value assumptions in training data, loss function, and rlhf. there is something about human interior experience of an objectively existing world that lets is evaluate true/false/good/bad in a way that is unique to humans among other animals.
llms can't do it. i dont just mean on ethical, epistemic, or aesthetic judgements, but even in practical circumstances like the ones engineers encounter. the reason engineers still have to work alongside llms, even though lllms are (imho) far better programmers and technicians, is that even when given a goal, there is always a graph of evaluations that lead to that objective and llms routinely fail to evaluate the tradeoffs and land in states in outcome space that are subtly (or not so subtly) wrong, even though the objective is complete!
forgive typos, i am on mobile.