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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

I prefer it’s displaying abductive reasoning. It’s able to produce likely answers with limited information or confounding information. It’s a type of reasoning that falls between inductive and deductive reasoning, and is a type of reasoning AI has been before now poor at.

Note that reasoning isn’t itself accurate in that LLMs have no agency. But they display characteristics of abductive reasoning. By integrating LLMs into goal based agents and tying them together with inductive and deductive solvers, optimizers, and IR systems you can probably get very close to a system that can truly reason.

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I agree with your overall description, but I still think reasoning is a term requiring autonomy.

A calculator doesn't reason.

'Abductive reasoning' in this special ML sense is a matter of statistical calculation.

My point being that we should stop implying that we're reconstructing human behavior, when what we are doing is _mimicking it_ through advanced recursion and statistics over huge amounts of inputs (big data).

Abductive reasoning OTOH relies on huge imperfections: human bias, flawed logic, misremembered facts, invented facts, all of whom are culturally situated, a sense of abstract self, a biological self and always an overarching, immanent telos.

Speculatively we might be inventing an entirely new category of existence whose logical categories (such as a special case 'abductive reasoning') cannot be understood in anthropomorphic terminology without distorting it. To me that's still science fiction, so far I've only seen automatons; shallow mimicking robots.

I agree that we won’t create a human intelligence. If we create an intelligence it’ll at best be a warped “something else.” However I’ll make the trite point that I don’t think we understand what makes human intelligence manifest. There’s no reason to believe its not at its basis a statistical optimization based on reinforced gradient descent. In fact it’s fairly likely to be the case. My assertion is as we mix other AI techniques in a feedback cycle we will see something more than this simple single model exploration can do and it’ll converge to what we would consider intelligence. But I agree fundamentally it won’t map to a human intelligence modality.

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