Scared Out of Your Mind - part the third

The lede to this recent Derek Lowe post was going to be added to the trove of Thoughts. But it deserves some discussion, if only because he's 'repeating' much of what I've offered about AI. It sure is Artificial, but it ain't Intelligent.

As regular readers well know, I get very frustrated when people use the verb "to reason" in describing the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Sometimes that's just verbal shorthand, but both in print and in person I keep running into examples of people who really, truly, believe that these things are going through a reasoning process. They are not. None of them.

Damn straight. As he says later on, AI as currently implemented is just processing a gazillion cell correlation matrix. It does take some code to do the 'next word' walk through, but that's been a solved problem for many decades. What's also annoying: the coder cabal has managed to take the credit for this execrable scam, while the true credit belongs to Nvidia and AML, IOW, AI is a figment of hardware density. We could have had AI as currently implemented with the ENIAC back in the '40s, just would have taken a bit longer to generate.

[T]he accuracy of the answers across all 68 questions dropped notably in every single LLM system when presented with a "None of the above" option. DeepSeek-R1 was the most resilient, but still degraded. The underlying problem is clear: no reasoning is going on, despite some of these systems being billed as having reasoning ability. Instead, this is all pattern matching, which presents the illusion of thought and the illusion of competence.

This is the same phenomenon which leads so many to say Ken Jennings is So Smart because he won so many games on Jeopardy!. No, just large and fast memory. Just like today's AI machines.

LLMs are text generators, working on probabilities of what their next word choice should be based on what has been seem in their training sets, then dispensing answer-shaped nuggets in smooth, confident, grammatical form. This is not reasoning and it is not understanding - at its best, it is an illusion that can pass for them. And that's what it is at its worst, too.

Ken Jennings in silicon.