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Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. They just memorize patterns really well.

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  • why is it assumed that this isn’t what human reasoning consists of?

    Because science doesn't work work like that. Nobody should assume wild hypotheses without any evidence whatsoever.

    Isn’t all our reasoning ultimately a form of pattern memorization? I sure feel like it is.

    You should get a job in "AI". smh.

    Sorry, I can see why my original post was confusing, but I think you've misunderstood me. I'm not claiming that I know the way humans reason. In fact you and I are on total agreement that it is unscientific to assume hypotheses without evidence. This is exactly what I am saying is the mistake in the statement "AI doesn't actually reason, it just follows patterns". That is unscientific if we don't know whether or "actually reasoning" consists of following patterns, or something else. As far as I know, the jury is out on the fundamental nature of how human reasoning works. It's my personal, subjective feeling that human reasoning works by following patterns. But I'm not saying "AI does actually reason like humans because it follows patterns like we do". Again, I see how what I said could have come off that way. What I mean more precisely is:

    It's not clear whether AI's pattern-following techniques are the same as human reasoning, because we aren't clear on how human reasoning works. My intuition tells me that humans doing pattern following seems equally as valid of an initial guess as humans not doing pattern following, so shouldn't we have studies to back up the direction we lean in one way or the other?

    I think you and I are in agreement, we're upholding the same principle but in different directions.

  • It is. And has always been. "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't mean a feeling thinking robot person (that would fall under AGI or artificial conciousness), it's a vast field of research in computer science with many, many things under it.

    ITT: people who obviously did not study computer science or AI at at least an undergraduate level.

    Y'all are too patient. I can't be bothered to spend the time to give people free lessons.

  • This has been known for years, this is the default assumption of how these models work.

    You would have to prove that some kind of actual reasoning capacity has arisen as... some kind of emergent complexity phenomenon.... not the other way around.

    Corpos have just marketed/gaslit us/themselves so hard that they apparently forgot this.

    Define, "reasoning". For decades software developers have been writing code with conditionals. That's "reasoning."

    LLMs are "reasoning"... They're just not doing human-like reasoning.

  • Employers who are foaming at the mouth at the thought of replacing their workers with cheap AI:

    🫢

    Can’t really replace. At best, this tech will make employees more productive at the cost of the rainforests.

  • In fact, simple computer programs do a great job of solving these puzzles...

    Yes, this shit is very basic. Not at all "intelligent."

    But reasoning about it is intelligent, and the point of this study is to determine the extent to which these models are reasoning or not. Which again, has nothing to do with emotions. And furthermore, my initial question about whether or not pattern following should automatically be disqualified as intelligence, as the person summarizing this study (and notably not the study itself) claims, is the real question here.

  • But it still manages to fuck it up.

    I've been experimenting with using Claude's Sonnet model in Copilot in agent mode for my job, and one of the things that's become abundantly clear is that it has certain types of behavior that are heavily represented in the model, so it assumes you want that behavior even if you explicitly tell it you don't.

    Say you're working in a yarn workspaces project, and you instruct Copilot to build and test a new dashboard using an instruction file. You'll need to include explicit and repeated reminders all throughout the file to use yarn, not NPM, because even though yarn is very popular today, there are so many older examples of using NPM in its model that it's just going to assume that's what you actually want - thereby fucking up your codebase.

    I've also had lots of cases where I tell it I don't want it to edit any code, just to analyze and explain something that's there and how to update it... and then I have to stop it from editing code anyway, because halfway through it forgot that I didn't want edits, just explanations.

    To be fair, the world of JavaScript is such a clusterfuck... Can you really blame the LLM for needing constant reminders about the specifics of your project?

    When a programming language has five hundred bazillion absolutely terrible ways of accomplishing a given thing—and endless absolutely awful code examples on the Internet to "learn from"—you're just asking for trouble. Not just from trying to get an LLM to produce what you want but also trying to get humans to do it.

    This is why LLMs are so fucking good at writing rust and Python: There's only so many ways to do a thing and the larger community pretty much always uses the same solutions.

    JavaScript? How can it even keep up? You're using yarn today but in a year you'll probably like, "fuuuuck this code is garbage... I need to convert this all to [new thing]."

  • No, it shows how certain people misunderstand the meaning of the word.

    You have called npcs in video games "AI" for a decade, yet you were never implying they were somehow intelligent. The whole argument is strangely inconsistent.

    "Artificial" has several meanings.

    One is:

    not being, showing, or resembling sincere or spontaneous behavior : fake

    AI in video games literally means "fake intelligence"

  • This is why I say these articles are so similar to how right wing media covers issues about immigrants.

    There's some weird media push to convince the left to hate AI. Think of all the headlines for these issues. There are so many similarities. They're taking jobs. They are a threat to our way of life. The headlines talk about how they will sexual assault your wife, your children, you. Threats to the environment. There's articles like this where they take something known as twist it to make it sound nefarious to keep the story alive and avoid decay of interest.

    Then when they pass laws, we're all primed to accept them removing whatever it is that advantageous them and disadvantageous us.

    Unlike fear-mongering from the right about immigrants, current iterations of AI development:

    • literally consume the environment (they are using electricity and water)
    • are taking jobs and siphoning money from the economy towards centralized corporate revenue streams that don't pay a fair share of taxes
    • I don't know of headlines claiming they will sexually assault you, but many headlines note that they can be used as part of sophisticated catfishing scams, which they are

    All of these things aren't scare tactics. They're often overblown and exaggerated for clicks, but the fundamental nature of the technology and corporate implementation of it indisputable.

    Open-source AI can change the world for the better. Corporate-controlled AI in some limited cases will improve the world, but without reasonable regulations they will severely harm it first.

  • Define reason.

    Like humans? Of course not. They lack intent, awareness, and grounded meaning. They don’t “understand” problems, they generate token sequences.

    as it is defined in the article

  • Brother you better hope it does because even if emissions dropped to 0 tonight the planet wouldnt stop warming and it wouldn't stop what's coming for us.

    If the situation gets dire, it's likely that the weather will be manipulated. Countries would then have to be convinced not to use this for military purposes.

  • Define, "reasoning". For decades software developers have been writing code with conditionals. That's "reasoning."

    LLMs are "reasoning"... They're just not doing human-like reasoning.

    Howabout uh...

    The ability to take a previously given set of knowledge, experiences and concepts, and combine or synthesize them in a consistent, non contradictory manner, to generate hitherto unrealized knowledge, or concepts, and then also be able to verify that those new knowledge and concepts are actually new, and actually valid, or at least be able to propose how one could test whether or not they are valid.

    Arguably this is or involves meta-cognition, but that is what I would say... is the difference between what we typically think of as 'machine reasoning', and 'human reasoning'.

    Now I will grant you that a large amount of humans essentially cannot do this, they suck at introspecting and maintaining logical consistency, that they are just told 'this is how things work', and they never question that untill decades later and their lives force them to address, or dismiss their own internally inconsisten beliefs.

    But I would also say that this means they are bad at 'human reasoning'.

    Basically, my definition of 'human reasoning' is perhaps more accurately described as 'critical thinking'.

  • 10^36 flops to be exact

    That sounds really floppy.

  • To be fair, the world of JavaScript is such a clusterfuck... Can you really blame the LLM for needing constant reminders about the specifics of your project?

    When a programming language has five hundred bazillion absolutely terrible ways of accomplishing a given thing—and endless absolutely awful code examples on the Internet to "learn from"—you're just asking for trouble. Not just from trying to get an LLM to produce what you want but also trying to get humans to do it.

    This is why LLMs are so fucking good at writing rust and Python: There's only so many ways to do a thing and the larger community pretty much always uses the same solutions.

    JavaScript? How can it even keep up? You're using yarn today but in a year you'll probably like, "fuuuuck this code is garbage... I need to convert this all to [new thing]."

    That's only part of the problem. Yes, JavaScript is a fragmented clusterfuck. Typescript is leagues better, but by no means perfect. Still, that doesn't explain why the LLM can't recall that I'm using Yarn while it's processing the instruction that specifically told it to use Yarn. Or why it tries to start editing code when I tell it not to. Those are still issues that aren't specific to the language.

  • Just like me

    python code for reversing the linked list.

  • Apple is significantly behind and arrived late to the whole AI hype, so of course it's in their absolute best interest to keep showing how LLMs aren't special or amazingly revolutionary.

    They're not wrong, but the motivation is also pretty clear.

    “Late to the hype” is actually a good thing. Gen AI is a scam wrapped in idiocy wrapped in a joke. That Apple is slow to ape the idiocy of microsoft is just fine.

  • Brother you better hope it does because even if emissions dropped to 0 tonight the planet wouldnt stop warming and it wouldn't stop what's coming for us.

    If emissions dropped to 0 tonight, we would be substantially better off than if we maintain our current trajectory. Doomerism helps nobody.

  • This is why I say these articles are so similar to how right wing media covers issues about immigrants.

    Maybe the actual problem is people who equate computer programs with people.

    Then when they pass laws, we’re all primed to accept them removing whatever it is that advantageous them and disadvantageous us.

    You mean laws like this? jfc.

    Literally what I'm talking about. They have been pushing anti AI propaganda to alienate the left from embracing it while the right embraces it. You have such a blind spot you this, you can't even see you're making my argument for me.

  • No, it shows how certain people misunderstand the meaning of the word.

    You have called npcs in video games "AI" for a decade, yet you were never implying they were somehow intelligent. The whole argument is strangely inconsistent.

    Strangely inconsistent + smoke & mirrors = profit!

  • But for something like solving a Towers of Hanoi puzzle, which is what this study is about, we're not looking for emotional judgements - we're trying to evaluate the logical reasoning capabilities. A sociopath would be equally capable of solving logic puzzles compared to a non-sociopath. In fact, simple computer programs do a great job of solving these puzzles, and they certainly have nothing like emotions. So I'm not sure that emotions have much relevance to the topic of AI or human reasoning and problem solving, at least not this particular aspect of it.

    As for analogizing LLMs to sociopaths, I think that's a bit odd too. The reason why we (stereotypically) find sociopathy concerning is that a person has their own desires which, in combination with a disinterest in others' feelings, incentivizes them to be deceitful or harmful in some scenarios. But LLMs are largely designed specifically as servile, having no will or desires of their own. If people find it concerning that LLMs imitate emotions, then I think we're giving them far too much credit as sentient autonomous beings - and this is coming from someone who thinks they think in the same way we do! The think like we do, IMO, but they lack a lot of the other subsystems that are necessary for an entity to function in a way that can be considered as autonomous/having free will/desires of its own choosing, etc.

    In fact, simple computer programs do a great job of solving these puzzles.....

    If an AI is trained to do this, it will be very good, like for example when a GPT-2 was trained to multiply numbers up to 20 digits.

    https://nitter.net/yuntiandeng/status/1836114419480166585#m

    Here they do the same test to GPT-4o, o1-mini and o3-mini

    https://nitter.net/yuntiandeng/status/1836114401213989366#m

    https://nitter.net/yuntiandeng/status/1889704768135905332#m

  • Why would they "prove" something that's completely obvious?

    The burden of proof is on the grifters who have overwhelmingly been making false claims and distorting language for decades.

    Not when large swaths of people are being told to use it everyday. Upper management has bought in on it.

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    Incredibly well said. And couldn't agree more! Especially after working as a game dev for Apple Arcade. We spent months proving to them their saving architecture was faulty and would lead to people losing their save file for each Apple Arcade game they play. We were ignored, and then told it was a dev problem. Cut to the launch of Arcade: every single game has several 1 star reviews about players losing their save files. This cannot be fixed by devs as it's an Apple problem, so devs have to figure out novel ways to prevent the issue from happening using their own time and resources. 1.5 years later, Apple finishes restructuring the entire backend of Arcade, fixing the problem. They tell all their devs to reimplement the saving architecture of their games to be compliant with Apples new backend or get booted from Arcade. This costs devs months of time to complete for literally zero return (Apple Arcade deals are upfront - little to no revenue is seen after launch). Apple used their trillions of dollars to ignore a massive backend issue that affected every player and developer on Apple Arcade. They then forced every dev to make an update to their game at their own expense just to keep it listed on Arcade. All while directing user frustration over the issue towards developers instead of taking accountability for launching a faulty product. Literally, these companies are run by sociopaths that have egos bigger than their paychecks. Issues like this are ignored as it's easier to place the blame on someone down the line. People like your manager end up getting promoted to the top of an office heirachy of bullshit, and everything the company makes just gets worse until whatever corpse is left is sold for parts to whatever bigger dumb company hasn't collapsed yet. It's really painful to watch, and even more painful to work with these idiots.
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    Amazon is an absolute scumbag company, they don't pay taxes and they shit all over their workers, and fight unions tooth and nail. I have no idea how people can buy at Amazon, that stands for everything Trump and Musk stands for. Just fucking stop using Amazon if you value democracy. Pay an extra dollar and buy somewhere else.
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    vendetta9076@sh.itjust.worksV
    I'm specifically talking about toil when it comes to my job as a software developer. I already know I need an if statement and a for loop all wrapped in a try catch. Rather then spending a couple minutes coding that I have cursor do it for me instantly then fill out the actual code. Or, ive written something in python and it needs to be converted to JavaScript. I can ask Claude to convert it one to one for me and test it, which comes back with either no errors or a very simple error I need to fix. It takes a minute. Instead I could have taken 15min to rewrite it myself and maybe make more mistakes that take longer.
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    Outlook.... Ok Pretty solid Bahaha hahahahaha Sorry. Outlook is a lot of things. "Gooey crap" would be one way to describe it, but "solid"? Yeah, no. Gmail is (well, was) pretty solid. There are a lot of other webmail providers out there, including self hosted options and most are pretty solid, yeah. Outlook, though? It's a shit show, it's annoying. Do you love me? Please love me, please give feedback, please give feedback again, please look at this, hey am I the best? Am I.. STFU YOU PIECE OF CRAP! Can you PLEASE just let me do my email without being an attention whore every hour? Even down to the basics. Back button? "What is that? Never heard of it, can't go back to the message I just was on because I'm Microsoft software and so half baked." Having two tabs open? "Oh noes, now I get scawed, now I don't know how to manage sessions anymore, better just sign you out everywhere." What is it with Microsoft and not being able to do something basic as sessions normal? I'm not even asking for good, definitely not "awesome", just normal, and that is already too much to ask. Try running it in Firefox! I'm sure it's totally not on purpose, just "oopsie woopsie poopsie" accidentally bwoken. Maybe it's working again today, who knows, tomorrow it'll be broken again. I run everything on Firefox except the Microsoft sites, they have to be in chrome because fuck you, that's why. Seriously, I can't take any Microsoft software seriously at this point, and all of it is on its way out in our company, I'm making sure of that