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Comment by cchance | Hacker News Reader

I mean considering the big breaththrough this year for o1/o3 seems to have been "models having internal thoughts might help reasoning", seems to everyone outside of the AI field was sort of a "duh" moment.

I'd hope we see more internal optimizations and improvements to the models. The idea that the big breakthrough being "don't spit out the first thought that pops into your head" seems obvious to everyone outside of the field, but guess what turns out it was a big improvement when the devs decided to add it.

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> seems obvious to everyone outside of the field

It's obvious to people inside the field too.

Honestly, these things seem to be less obvious to people outside the field. I've heard so many uninformed takes about LLMs not representing real progress towards intelligence (even here on HN of all places; I don't know why I torture myself reading them), that they're just dumb memorizers. No, they are an incredible breakthrough, because extending them with things like internal thoughts will so obviously lead to results such as o3, and far beyond. Maybe a few more people will start to understand the trajectory we're on.

> No, they are an incredible breakthrough, because extending them with things like internal thoughts will so obviously lead to results such as o3, and far beyond.

While I agree that the LLM progress as of late is interesting, the rest of your sentiment sounds more like you are in a cult.

As long as your field keep coming with less and less realistic predictions and fail to deliver over and over, eventually even the most gullible will lose faith in you.

Because that's what this all is right now. Faith.

> Maybe a few more people will start to understand the trajectory we're on.

All you are saying is that you believe something will happen in the future.

We can't have a intelligent discussion under those premises.

It's depressing to see so many otherwise smart people fall for their own hype train. You are only helping rich people get more rich by spreading their lies.

I know I'm at fault for emotively complaining about "uninformed takes" in my comment instead of being substantive, which I regret, and I deserve replies such as this. I'll try harder to avoid getting into these arguments next time.

I wouldn't be an AI researcher if I didn't have "faith" that AI as a goal is worthwhile and achievable and I can make progress. You think this is irrational?

I am actually working to improve the SoTA in mathematical reasoning. I have documents full of concrete ideas for how to do that. So does everyone else in AI, in their niche. We are in an era of low hanging fruit enabled by ML breakthroughs such as large-scale transformers. I'm not someone who thinks you can simply keep scaling up transformers to solve AI. But consider System 1 and System 2 thinking: System 1 sure looks solved right now.

> As long as your field keep coming with less and less realistic predictions and fail to deliver over and over

I don't think we're commenting on the same article here. For example, FrontierMath was expected to be near impossible for LLMs for years, now here we are 5 weeks later at 25%.

a trickle of people sure, but most people never accidentally stumble upon good evaluation skills let alone reason themselves to that level, so i dont see how most people will have the semblance of an idea of a realistic trajectory of ai progress. i think most people have very little conceptualization of their own thinking/cognitive patterns, at least not enough to sensibly extrapolate it onto ai.

doesnt help that most people are just mimics when talking about stuff thats outside their expertise.

Hell, my cousin a quality-college educated individual, high social/ emotional iq, will go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole so quickly based on some baseless crap printed on the internet. then he’ll talk about people being satan worshipers.

You're being pretty harsh, but:

> i think most people have very little conceptualization of their own thinking/cognitive patterns, at least not enough to sensibly extrapolate it onto ai.

Quite true. If you spend a lot of time reading and thinking about the workings of the mind you lose sight of how alien it is to intuition. While in highschool I first read, in New Scientist, the theory that conscious thought lags behind the underlying subconscious processing in the brain. I was shocked that New Scientist would print something so unbelievable. Yet there seemed to be an element of truth to it so I kept thinking about it and slowly changed my assessment.

sorry, humans are stupid and what intelligence they have is largely impotent. if this wasnt the case life wouldnt be this dystopia. my crassness comes from not necessarily trying to pick on a particular group of humans, just disappointment in recognizing the efficacy of human intelligence and its ability to turn reality into a better reality (meh).

yeah i was just thinking how a lot of thoughts which i thought were my original thoughts really were made possible out of communal thoughts. like i can maybe have some original frontier thoughts that involve averages but thats only made possible because some other person invented the abstraction of averages then that was collectively disseminated to everyone in education, not to mention all the subconscious processes that are necessary for me to will certainly thoughts into existsnce. makes me reflect on how much cognition is really mine, vs (not mine) a inevitable product of a deterministic process and a product of other humans.

> only made possible because some other person invented the abstraction of averages then that was collectively disseminated to everyone in education

What I find most fascinating about the history of mathematics is that basic concepts such as zero and negative numbers and graphs of functions, which are so easy to teach to students, required so many mathematicians over so many centuries. E.g. Newton figured out calculus because he gave so much thought to the works of Descartes.

Yes, I think "new" ideas (meaning, a particular synthesis of existing ones) are essentially inevitable, and how many people come up with them, and how soon, is a function of how common those prerequisites are.

Sounds like your cousin is able to think for himself. The amount of bullshit I hear from quality-college educated individuals, who simply repeat outdated knowledge that is in their college curriculum, is no less disappointing.

Buying whatever bullshit you see on the internet to such a degree that you're re-enacting satanic panic from the 80s is not "thinking for yourself". It's being gullible about areas outside your expertise.

Reflection isn’t a new concept, but a) actually proving that it’s an effective tool for these types of models and b) finding an effective method for reflection that doesn’t just locks you into circular “thinking” were the hard parts and hence the “breakthrough”.

It’s very easy to say hey ofc it’s obvious but there is nothing obvious about it because you are anthropomorphizing these models and then using that bias after the fact as a proof of your conjecture.

This isn’t how real progress is achieved.

Calling it reflection is, for me, further anthropomorphizing. However I am in violent agreement that a common feature of llm debate is centered around anthropomorphism leading to claims of "thinking longer" or "reflecting" when none of those things are happening.

The state of the art seems very focused on promoting that language that might encode reason is as good as actual reason, rather than asking what a reasoning model might look like.

I didn’t name it, to me I think it’s more about reflecting the output back on itself which doesn’t necessarily means anthropomorphism.

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