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Comment by ainoobler | Hacker News Reader

The article suggests a useful line of research. Train an LLM to detect logical fallacies and then see if that can be bootstrapped into something useful because it's pretty clear that all the issues with LLMs is the lack of logical capabilities. If an LLM was capable of logical reasoning then it would be obvious when it was generating made-up nonsense instead of referencing existing sources of consistent information.

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> If an LLM was capable of logical reasoning

the prompt interfaces + smartphone apps were (from the beginning), and are ongoing training for the next iteration, they provide massive RLHF for further improvements in already quite RLHFed advanced models.

Whatever tokens they're extracting from all the interactions, the most valuable are those from metadata, like "correct answer in one shot", or "correct answer in three shots".

The inputs and potentially the outputs can be gibberish, but the metadata can be mostly accurate given some implicit/explicit (the tumbs up, the "thanks" answers from users, maybe), human feedback.

The RLHF refinement extracted from getting the models face the entire human population for to be continuously, 24x7x365, prompted in all languages, about all the topics interesting for the human society, must be incredible. If you just can extract a single percentage of definitely "correct answers" from the total prompts answered, it should be massive compared to just a few thousands of QA dedicated RLHF people working on the models in the initial iterations of training.

That was GPT2,3,4, initial iterations of the training. Having the models been evolved to more powerful (mathematical) entities, you can use them to train the next models. Like is almost certainly happening.

My bet is that one of two

- The scaling thing is working spectacularly, they've seen linear improvement in blue/green deployments across the world + realtime RLHF, and maybe it is going a bit slow, but the improvements justify just a bit more waiting to get trained a more powerful,refined model, incredible more better answers from even the previous datasets used (now more deeply inquired by the new models and the new massive RLHF data), if in a year they have a 20x GPT4, Claude, Gemini, whatever, they could be "jumping" to the next 40x GPT4, Claude, Gemini, a lot faster, if they have the most popular, prompted model in the market (in the world).

- The scaling stuff already sunk, they have seen the numbers and it doesn't add by now, or they've seen disminished returns coming. This is being firmly denied by anyone on the record or off the record.

I think we should start smaller and make them able to count first.

Yeah, you can train an LLM to recognize the vocabulary and grammatical features of logical fallacies... Except the nature of fallacies is that they look real on that same linguistic level, so those features aren't distinctive for that purpose.

Heck, I think detecting sarcasm would be an easier goal, and still tricky.

> Except the nature of fallacies is that they look real on that same linguistic level, so those features aren't distinctive for that purpose

Well that's actually good news. With a large enough labelled dataset of actually-sound and fallacious text with similar grammatical features you should be able to train a discriminator to distinguish between them using some other metric. Good luck with getting that data set though.

The Entscheidungsproblem tends to rear its ugly problem

Remember NP is equivalent to second order logic with existential quantified. E.g. for any X there exists a Y

And that only gets you to truthy Trues, co-NP is another problem.

ATP is hard, and while we get lucky with some constrained problems like type inference, which is pathological in its runtime, but decidable, Pressburger arithmetic is the highest form we know is decidable.

It is a large reason CS uses science and falsification vs proofs.

Gödel and the difference between Symantec and syntactic completeness is another rat hole.

> you should be able to train a discriminator to distinguish between them using some other metric

Not when the better metrics are likely alien/incompatible to the discriminator's core algorithm!

Then it's rather inconvenient news, because it means you have to develop something separate and novel.

As the other poster already mentioned, if we can't even get them to reliably count how many objects are being referred to, how do you expect them to also handle logical syllogisms?

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