alt Hacker NewsI feel like the current “reasoning” that LLMs are doing has got to be a dead end eventually. Every time I have to read another answer with “but wait” and “Actually,” as they “reason” their way to a (sometimes) better answer, I feel like there’s got to be a way to just shortcut to the actual correct answer instead of burning all these token going in circles mimicking actual thought
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It needs to argue with itself to extract most of the knowledge embedded in the weights into the context. Asking it to synthesize ideas directly in a single go is simply unreasonable. And MoE models need to walk multiple experts to extract all the knowledge on top of that. So you need to give them the reasoning trace to first spill all the associations into.
It “thinks out loud” to populate its token space. Asking it to shortcut risks truncating that process.
I was pretty happy with Depseek Pro in Opencode util I discovered I can see the thinking trace by clicking on the "thinking..." communicate. All those seemingly unnecessary "but wait" messages are frustrating to read. But at least to some extent it's just model taking time thinking through the problem, and the trace produced doesn't have to be representative of what happens internally: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758
So-called "caveman" thinking attempts to address this.
The important part of "actually wait, I really need to XYZ" is just "XYZ".
The model can attend to just "do XYZ" and produce almost the same vector modifications as full verbose "reasoning".
I hated it at first too...
Now though I'm considering all the hidden "thinking" in the models layers that happens for each token output. It is a wild amount of waste! We just can't see it.
This kind of stupid excessive computation is fundamentally how these models are so good.
One day hopefully not so soon someone smart or a foundation model will come up with a more efficient architecture. That's when things get really scary.
Chain-of-thought output shouldn't be taken literally. The tokens are a substrate for computation, not necessarily evidence that the model is wasting time and electricity by gratuitously second-guessing itself over and over.
You can see evidence of this phenomenon in models dating back to the OG Deepseek R1. It was common to see the model talk itself out of the correct solution in the <thinking> block, or fail to reach it at all, only to produce a correct answer in the response. And vice versa; it was also common to see it reason its way to the right answer and then fail to follow through in the response.
Hardcode their "thoughts" in your agents.md... But they might still reason through it anyway.
One line of evolution seems to be toward some form of latent-space reasoning, as in [1]. Natural language seems like a relatively low-bandwidth channel for intermediate reasoning.
[1] https://github.com/sapientinc/HRM-Text