Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In order for an AI to reason it doesn’t mean it has to be able to reason about everything at any level - most humans cant rediscover fundamental mathematical theorems from basic axioms, particularly if you keep removing them until they fail, but I don’t think that means most humans are unable to reason.

Take this problem instead which certainly requires some reasoning to answer:

“Consider a theoretical world where people who are shorter always have bigger feet. Ben is taller than Paul, and Paul is taller than Andrew. Steve is shorter than Andrew. Everyone walks the same number of steps each day. All other things being equal, who would step on the most bugs and why?”

I think it’s a logical error to say “AI can’t reason about this, so that proves that it can’t reason about anything at all” (particularly if that example is something most humans can’t do!). The LLMs reasoning is limited compared to human reasoning right now, although it is still definitely demonstrating reasoning.

> "Consider a theoretical world where people who are shorter always have bigger feet. Ben is taller than Paul, and Paul is taller than Andrew. Steve is shorter than Andrew. Everyone walks the same number of steps each day. All other things being equal, who would step on the most bugs and why?"

Because Ben is the tallest, his feet are the biggest, and because he takes the same amount of steps as the others, the amount of area he steps on is larger than the area that the others step on.

Therefore Ben is most likely to be the one to step on the most bugs.

Easy. And I'm not brilliant.

The problem with testing these tools is that you need to ask it a question that is not in their training sets. Most things have been proven, so if a proof is in its training set, the LLM just regurgitates it.

But I also disagree: if the "AI" can't reason about that, it can't reason because that one is so simple my pre-Kindergarten nieces and nephews can do it.

But even if not, the LLM's should have "knowledge" about exponential functions and factorial because the humans who wrote the material in their training sets did. So it's not a lack of knowledge.

And I claim that most humans could rediscover theorems from basic axioms; you've just never asked them to.

“In this theoretical world, shorter people have bigger feet. Given the information provided, we can deduce the following height order:

Ben (tallest) Paul Andrew Steve (shortest) Since shorter people have bigger feet in this world, we can also deduce the following order for foot size:

Steve (biggest feet) Andrew Paul Ben (smallest feet) Assuming that everyone walks the same number of steps each day and all other things being equal, the person with the biggest feet would be more likely to step on the most bugs simply because their larger foot size would cover a greater surface area, increasing the likelihood of coming into contact with bugs on the ground.

Therefore, Steve, who is the shortest and has the biggest feet, would step on the most bugs.”

GPT4 solved it correctly. You didn’t.

My bad. I would have if I hadn't gotten mixed up on the shorter vs taller. You know this too.

And GPT4 didn't solve it correctly. It's a probability, not a certainty, that the shortest person will step on more bugs.

Sure, you would have got it right if you didn't get it wrong.

At the very least, this should be evidence that the problem wasn't a totally-trivial easy pre-kintergarden level problem though, and it did manage to correctly solve it.

It required understanding new axioms (smaller = bigger feet) and infering that people with bigger feet would crush more bugs without this being mentioned in the challenge.

Your dismissal that the AI messed up because it didn't phrase the correct answer back in the way you liked is a little harsh IMO, as the AI's explanation does make it clear it is basing it on likelihoods ("the person with the biggest feet would be more likely...").

That mix up must be the human touch you’ve spoken so highly of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com