alt Hacker NewsQuoting an older comment of mine...
Intelligence is the ability to reason about logic. If 1 + 1 is 2, and 1 + 2 is 3, then 1 + 3 must be 4. This is deterministic, and it is why LLMs are not intelligent and can never be intelligent no matter how much better they get at superficially copying the form of output of intelligence. Probabilistic prediction is inherently incompatible with deterministic deduction. We're years into being told AGI is here (for whatever squirmy value of AGI the hype huckster wants to shill), and yet LLMs, as expected, still cannot do basic arithmetic that a child could do without being special-cased to invoke a tool call.
Our computer programs execute logic, but cannot reason about it. Reasoning is the ability to dynamically consider constraints we've never seen before and then determine how those constraints would lead to a final conclusion. The rules of mathematics we follow are not programmed into our DNA; we learn them and follow them while our human-programming is actively running. But we can just as easily, at any point, make up new constraints and follow them to new conclusions. What if 1 + 2 is 2 and 1 + 3 is 3? Then we can reason that under these constraints we just made up, 1 + 4 is 4, without ever having been programmed to consider these rules.Replies
>Intelligence is the ability to reason about logic. If 1 + 1 is 2, and 1 + 2 is 3, then 1 + 3 must be 4.
Human Intelligence is clearly not logic based so I'm not sure why you have such a definition.
>and yet LLMs, as expected, still cannot do basic arithmetic that a child could do without being special-cased to invoke a tool call.
One of the most irritating things about these discussions is proclamations that make it pretty clear you've not used these tools in a while or ever. Really, when was the last time you had LLMs try long multi-digit arithmetic on random numbers ? Because your comment is just wrong.
>What if 1 + 2 is 2 and 1 + 3 is 3? Then we can reason that under these constraints we just made up, 1 + 4 is 4, without ever having been programmed to consider these rules.
Good thing LLMs can handle this just fine I guess.
Your entire comment perfectly encapsulates why symbolic AI failed to go anywhere past the initial years. You have a class of people that really think they know how intelligence works, but build it that way and it fails completely.
>Intelligence is the ability to reason about logic. If 1 + 1 is 2, and 1 + 2 is 3, then 1 + 3 must be 4. This is deterministic, and it is why LLMs are not intelligent and can never be intelligent no matter how much better they get at superficially copying the form of output of intelligence.
This is not even wrong.
>Probabilistic prediction is inherently incompatible with deterministic deduction.
And his is just begging the question again.
Probabilistic prediction could very well be how we do deterministic deduction - e.g. about how strong the weights and how hot the probability path for those deduction steps are, so that it's followed every time, even if the overall process is probabilistic.
Probabilistic doesn't mean completely random.