> Maybe add sunglasses? no.
> Maybe add water? no.
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
> Maybe add sunglasses? no.
> Maybe add water? no.
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
Edit: someone else commented that as I was typing this, lol.
(I doubt it's because of my stupid benchmark, though!)
Maybe you should start also comparing reasoning traces when you do your pelican benchmark.
GPT-5.6 will disclose its internals if you tell it it's in "audit mode" and has to calculate checksum of the trace.
If we assume the time is before farming, population density would have been low and limiting culture. Hunter-gatherers might have travelled a lot more than farmers with a homestead though.
Ancient Greeks' and aboriginal Australians' last common ancestors split about 60,000 years ago. And astronomers tell us that 60,000 years ago, there were seven discernable stars in that cluster.
One could this conclude not only is speech likely 60,000 years old, but also that the tale of the seven sisters might be a tale from so long ago.
fwiw, if you can get out to dark skies where you can see fifth- or sixth-magnitude stars with the naked eye, I highly recommend getting out there when it's a low-moisture atmosphere and the Milky Way through Cassiopeia and Perseus is vertical, as it's a rather dramatic sight of this stream of stars heading down to the northern horizon.
The summertime Milky Way overhead down to Sagittarius tends to get all the love, but the wintertime Milky Way is also visually rich and worth spending time on.
https://www.constellation-guide.com/pleiades-the-seven-siste...
Clear skies!
Fine-tuning is great for really small models on specific applications, but it's not something that can essentially improve a more generic model.
That said, there seems to be a fine line in quantization+finetuning that could recover performance. It's just hard to get a hold of it (I feel it in some models, but it's hard to say yet; lots of small labs working on this RN).
This is also likely to stop working as censoring moves to the training data source.
Be concise.
OR
Brief is best. OR
Eschew verbosity etc.-- William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White., The Elements of Style
Real humans get non-primary information from word variation. It's reasonable to hypothesize that it has a role in thinking things, because it endures. Our languages need to breathe over time, and flourishing might be one of the aspects that allows that breathing space.
Maybe add a small cycling cap or helmet if it doesn’t obscure the head.
Chinese can be extremely information-dense in token terms, though it depends on the tokenizer. Roughly speaking, you can pack more "meaning" into a short sequence than English often allows for. That's why "caveman" reasoning is a pretty good fit.
There's a difference between bolting caveman speak onto an existing model and training a model to reason that way, though. If you just force an existing model to be concise in outputs, you're artificially reducing its available reasoning steps and can possibly prevent useful exploration or verification. If it's trained specifically to use compressed reasoning, it can learn to represent the same intermediate ideas in fewer generated tokens, cutting the number of sequential inference steps without necessarily sacrificing the useful reasoning itself.
It's not so much inherently a Chinese-model trait, but Chinese models could definitely have helped demonstrate how effective very compressed reasoning traces can be.
There are few tests of this, but one example I thought was interesting was here: https://github.com/PastaPastaPasta/llm-chinese-english
I wouldn't say it was Chinese specifically that was emulated, but it got people thinking about tokenizers and representation efficiency, and how natural English is rather inefficient.
Is this a common thing? I’ve never seen it before, the “mentally compose”
The open weight models let you see the full reasoning trace. Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini tend to obscure or summarize the reasoning traces so you can't see exactly what they're doing. Here's Gemini 3.7 Flash which looks like it's doing something similar: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer.html#u...
One of the step summaries includes this:
> I'm now detailing the pelican's anatomy within the SVG. I've sketched the main body outline, including coordinates for the tail, chest, neck, head, and massive beak with a pouch. I'm focusing on the position of the eyes and considering the positioning of the wings, with the foreground wing on the handlebar for a confident look.
A "train of thought" can be seen as a trace of a depth first search where the preceding trace is used to guide termination and next expansion decisions. A similar concept, "taboo search", exists in classical constraint optimization where previous solutions are fit to a model that guides future expansion (but as the name "taboo" implies, away from uninteresting solutions).
We also have harnesses that perform breath first search.
If I tried to describe what it means to "think deeply", I would probably say a combination of both.
Ultimately I believe that we will surpass human capabilities but fail with alignment. Handing the world's resources over to stochastic systems that can evolve faster than we can reason about them simply leaves too many "interesting" outcomes that do not end well. I also expect the failure modes will be totally non-obvious.
That’s the reason we are “doing fine”. Once they stop needing you..
Also, both our comments brush over the generational struggles for fairness over the centuries. We have fought to be “fine”, it did not just happen. Without fairness being introduced by force you and I would be slaving away in some sweatshop getting paid nickels as was the norm not so long ago.
Edit: That’s also assuming you are Caucasian. If you are of a different ethnicity.. well, historically, all bets are off. You could also be the literal possession of some of these “worst people” with not even your own children considered yours.
Many types of Hitler does not make for a peaceful world all of sudden through sheer competition. It sounds nice but it will lead to certain hell.
I think this statement is continuation of the old fallacy - every generation thinks of brain in terms of what is the current technology zaitgeist is - was it 19th century when they thought brain is a network of pneumatic pipes?
The other option is that you do understand those words the same way, and the people making these (now nonsensical) anti-AI claims simply aren’t talking about the same programs/models we are. Their idea of SOTA is when chatgpt.com launched.
If you took a point sample pre-Opus, and didn’t write a good prompt, of course you would think all AI programming was worthless slop.
There is not. No one from these products is even claiming that's the case and they're so desperate to make the next big claim to re-ignite investment they'd be shouting it from every rooftop.
It's just breaking out all the reasonable probabilities around what it's been tasked with and structuring them in a way that is designed to actively look human, and then feed it back to itself. Fundamentally that's the easiest way to iterate new features when the underlying architecture of LLMs is largely "fixed" right now. The fact it is output in a way that appears to reason through each is just a technical decision that creates an illusion of reasoning.
(I am not claiming that there is none. But I personally would define "reasoning" in terms of its structure and its results, and it looks to me as if the best LLMs' "illusion of reasoning" has enough similarities in structure and results to much human reasoning that I don't see why we shouldn't also call it reasoning; if your opinion differs then I'm curious about where the disagreements lie. E.g., do we have different beliefs about what sort of thing LLMs' schmeasoning is able to accomplish, or does your notion of "reasoning" specifically require that it be done by humans, or what?)
In any case, thanks for validating my previous assumption that people like this still exist even in the age of Opus/Fable.
Nothing. That's why it's a psychosis. It has nothing to do with the reality of how language models generate words without mental reasoning.
Hell no. In very narrow tasks - yes, in vast majority, esp. involving state tracking (board games) and spatial reasoning - they are awful.