I found the aeticle in a post on the fediverse, and I can’t find it anymore.
The reaserchers asked a simple mathematical question to an LLM ( like 7+4) and then could see how internally it worked by finding similar paths, but nothing like performing mathematical reasoning, even if the final answer was correct.
Then they asked the LLM to explain how it found the result, what was it’s internal reasoning. The answer was detailed step by step mathematical logic, like a human explaining how to perform an addition.
This showed 2 things:
-
LLM don’t “know” how they work
-
the second answer was a rephrasing of original text used for training that explain how math works, so LLM just used that as an explanation
I think it was a very interesting an meaningful analysis
Can anyone help me find this?
EDIT: thanks to @theunknownmuncher @lemmy.world https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model its this one
EDIT2: I’m aware LLM dont “know” anything and don’t reason, and it’s exactly why I wanted to find the article. Some more details here: https://feddit.it/post/18191686/13815095
Can’t help but here’s a rant on people asking LLMs to “explain their reasoning” which is impossible because they can never reason (not meant to be attacking OP, just attacking the “LLMs think and reason” people and companies that spout it):
LLMs are just matrix math to complete the most likely next word. They don’t know anything and can’t reason.
Anything you read or hear about LLMs or “AI” getting “asked questions” or “explain its reasoning” or talking about how they’re “thinking” is just AI propaganda to make you think they’re doing something LLMs literally can’t do but people sure wish they could.
In this case it sounds like people who don’t understand how LLMs work eating that propaganda up and approaching LLMs like there’s something to talk to or discern from.
If you waste egregiously high amounts of gigawatts to put everything that’s ever been typed into matrices you can operate on, you get a facsimile of the human knowledge that went into typing all of that stuff.
It’d be impressive if the environmental toll making the matrices and using them wasn’t critically bad.
TLDR; LLMs can never think or reason, anyone talking about them thinking or reasoning is bullshitting, they utilize almost everything that’s ever been typed to give (occasionally) reasonably useful outputs that are the most basic bitch shit because that’s the most likely next word at the cost of environmental disaster
