Eliezer Yudkowsky

I think that if, you know, like half of today's physicists stop wasting their lives on string theory or whatever and go off and study what goes on inside transformer networks, then in, you know, like 30, 40 years, we'd probably have a pretty good idea.

Do you think these large language models can reason?

They can play chess.

How are they doing that without reasoning?

I mean, in my writings on rationality, I have not gone making a big deal out of something called reason.

I have made more of a big deal out of something called probability theory.

And that's like, well, your reasoning...

But you're not doing it quite right, and you should reason this way instead.

And interestingly, people have started to get preliminary results showing that reinforcement learning by human feedback has made the GPT series worse in some ways.

In particular, it used to be well-calibrated.

If you trained it to put probabilities on things, it would say 80% probability and be right 8 times out of 10.

And if you apply reinforcement learning from human feedback, the nice graph of 70% 7 out of 10 sort of flattens out into the graph that humans use, where there's some very improbable stuff.

And

likely, probable, maybe, which all means like around 40%, and then certain.

So it's like it used to be able to use probabilities, but if you apply, but if you try to teach it to talk in a way that satisfies humans, it gets worse at probability in the same way that humans are.

And that's a bug, not a feature.

I would call it a bug.

Although such a fascinating bug.

But yeah, so like reasoning, like it's doing pretty well on various tests that people used to say would require reasoning.

But, you know, rationality is about when you say 80%, does it happen eight times out of 10?