Apple Machine Learning Research has a new preprint: “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity.” [Apple, PDF] “Lar…
The promptfondlers on places like /r/singularity are trying so hard to spin this paper. “It’s still doing reasoning, it just somehow mysteriously fails when you it’s reasoning gets too long!” or “LRMs improved with an intermediate number of reasoning tokens” or some other excuse. They are missing the point that short and medium length “reasoning” traces are potentially the result of pattern memorization. If the LLMs are actually reasoning and aren’t just pattern memorizing, then extending the number of reasoning tokens proportionately with the task length should let the LLMs maintain performance on the tasks instead of catastrophically failing. Because this isn’t the case, apple’s paper is evidence for what big names like Gary Marcus, Yann Lecun, and many pundits and analysts have been repeatedly saying: LLMs achieve their results through memorization, not generalization, especially not out-of-distribution generalization.
The promptfondlers on places like /r/singularity are trying so hard to spin this paper. “It’s still doing reasoning, it just somehow mysteriously fails when you it’s reasoning gets too long!” or “LRMs improved with an intermediate number of reasoning tokens” or some other excuse. They are missing the point that short and medium length “reasoning” traces are potentially the result of pattern memorization. If the LLMs are actually reasoning and aren’t just pattern memorizing, then extending the number of reasoning tokens proportionately with the task length should let the LLMs maintain performance on the tasks instead of catastrophically failing. Because this isn’t the case, apple’s paper is evidence for what big names like Gary Marcus, Yann Lecun, and many pundits and analysts have been repeatedly saying: LLMs achieve their results through memorization, not generalization, especially not out-of-distribution generalization.
/r/justonemoreprompt
Just one more training run bro. Just gotta make the model bigger, then it can do bigger puzzles, obviously!
prompfondlers
Holy shit, I love it.
https://awful.systems/comment/7326260
I still prefer promptards
i prefer that you take your ableist vocabulary somewhere else, preferably stick it up your arse.
Hey now, there’s plenty of generalization going on with LLM networks, it’s just that we’ve taken to calling it hallucinations these days.