That’s what is wild about it. At any given point in time, the model is wholly consumed only with the very next token. Maybe that token is a running narrative of ‘reasoning’ or directly in the output, either way, the AI does not have anything to model anything beyond the very next token. It doesn’t have a destination in mind and is just finding the words to get there, it’s building it up word by word. The overall ‘meaning’ is an emergent property of just picking the very next token and seeing what happens.
Honestly, it’s shocking it works as well as it does. More shockingly, there are AI enthusiasts that argue that’s how the human brain works, which I can’t imagine someone going through life with every thought rooted in building it up word by word.
Well yes and no. it is steered by a buffer of context as well that sorts/ranks/informs what the next word should be. That context differentiates if you are talking about apple the fruit or apple the company or apple the device. Heres a great overview if anyone is interested. And no, its not my video. Its a youtube intro to how AI works. Best watched with duckduckgo browser which trims out youtubes overly frequent ad interruptions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYvlznJ4IZQ
But that context is a mix of model output and other sources. The model output portion was generated token by token, and is combined in interesting ways with things like human response, search results, software output. It’s still a backward looking mechanism, rather than having established a concept as a goal and then trying to build the words to reach that concept like we do.
Size and strategy for managing the context has been critical for improved subjective results, but it still doesn’t exhibit the behavior of the words as a tool to address some concept, everything about the model is about the words themselves. So we end up with something very good at generating what seems right and there’s a super high chance of what seems to be right actually being right. Especially when the software can automatically execute commands and the good or bad results reach into the context window, enabling it to effectively get automatically second guessed. The potential for automatic verification in some scenarios automatically feeding the context window is what makes it particularly appealing for software folks, though not universal.
Its just a ball rolling down a hill trying to find the lowest point, but its like a super fancy ball with a ton of rules, and the hills are really detailed with like little walls and bridges and stuff.
I assumed that but everything I have seen as I dug deeper has been that at some level that is what is happening. If it is ‘reasoning’, it’s generating a ‘reasoning chain’ next token by next token and using that to influence the final output tokens. The reasoning chain is discarded and since the actual output is a continuation of the reasoning chain it may conceptually be described as allowing the model to ‘rethink’ things, but even as the generation of a ‘reasoning chain’ has results that more closely resemble reasoning, it is still a scenario where it’s building it one token at a time and we get to see meaning as an emergent property, rather than trying to find words to build to a more abstract concept like humans do. It just gets to throw away the intermediate work and the extra tokens manage to improve the ‘accuracy’ of the preserved final output.
The interesting bits are when it derives the likely hood of something being correct and does more passes, or splits the data apart in the first pass and opens up new context processes with specialized instructions to handle it. The code stuff goes full on ororborus on some models, writes out the code on one pass, checks for issues on another pass, runs the code looking for errors on a third pass and goes back to step 1 if it fails.
They’re getting a lot out of it for it primarily just being a weighted token generator wrapped in an orchestrator.
Particularly software development with very good and very quick tests allow rerolling and that is very appealing in those scenarios. Problems being that very good tests are rarer than people like to think and sometimes it just gets stuck in a loop. At work the other week someone set it at the task of fixing a bunch of build warnings that had accumulated over the years. It succeeded after burning through tokens to take 30 tries at it. It’s solution after all that hard thinking? It put // @ts-nocheck at the top of every file and called it a day.
But superficially, someone handed it a chore and didn’t have to think about it, and if no one looked deeper, then it was able to get to the desired behavior simply by rerunning the given task over and over without human intervention until it worked. Which is also broadly relatable as there’s a lot of humans in the industry acting broadly the same, but I’ve always been frustrated by those folks anyway.
That’s what is wild about it. At any given point in time, the model is wholly consumed only with the very next token. Maybe that token is a running narrative of ‘reasoning’ or directly in the output, either way, the AI does not have anything to model anything beyond the very next token. It doesn’t have a destination in mind and is just finding the words to get there, it’s building it up word by word. The overall ‘meaning’ is an emergent property of just picking the very next token and seeing what happens.
Honestly, it’s shocking it works as well as it does. More shockingly, there are AI enthusiasts that argue that’s how the human brain works, which I can’t imagine someone going through life with every thought rooted in building it up word by word.
Well yes and no. it is steered by a buffer of context as well that sorts/ranks/informs what the next word should be. That context differentiates if you are talking about apple the fruit or apple the company or apple the device. Heres a great overview if anyone is interested. And no, its not my video. Its a youtube intro to how AI works. Best watched with duckduckgo browser which trims out youtubes overly frequent ad interruptions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYvlznJ4IZQ
But that context is a mix of model output and other sources. The model output portion was generated token by token, and is combined in interesting ways with things like human response, search results, software output. It’s still a backward looking mechanism, rather than having established a concept as a goal and then trying to build the words to reach that concept like we do.
Size and strategy for managing the context has been critical for improved subjective results, but it still doesn’t exhibit the behavior of the words as a tool to address some concept, everything about the model is about the words themselves. So we end up with something very good at generating what seems right and there’s a super high chance of what seems to be right actually being right. Especially when the software can automatically execute commands and the good or bad results reach into the context window, enabling it to effectively get automatically second guessed. The potential for automatic verification in some scenarios automatically feeding the context window is what makes it particularly appealing for software folks, though not universal.
its not that simple. whatever opinion you might on llms have you have to agree this is oversimplifying at best.
Its just a ball rolling down a hill trying to find the lowest point, but its like a super fancy ball with a ton of rules, and the hills are really detailed with like little walls and bridges and stuff.
I assumed that but everything I have seen as I dug deeper has been that at some level that is what is happening. If it is ‘reasoning’, it’s generating a ‘reasoning chain’ next token by next token and using that to influence the final output tokens. The reasoning chain is discarded and since the actual output is a continuation of the reasoning chain it may conceptually be described as allowing the model to ‘rethink’ things, but even as the generation of a ‘reasoning chain’ has results that more closely resemble reasoning, it is still a scenario where it’s building it one token at a time and we get to see meaning as an emergent property, rather than trying to find words to build to a more abstract concept like humans do. It just gets to throw away the intermediate work and the extra tokens manage to improve the ‘accuracy’ of the preserved final output.
The interesting bits are when it derives the likely hood of something being correct and does more passes, or splits the data apart in the first pass and opens up new context processes with specialized instructions to handle it. The code stuff goes full on ororborus on some models, writes out the code on one pass, checks for issues on another pass, runs the code looking for errors on a third pass and goes back to step 1 if it fails.
They’re getting a lot out of it for it primarily just being a weighted token generator wrapped in an orchestrator.
Particularly software development with very good and very quick tests allow rerolling and that is very appealing in those scenarios. Problems being that very good tests are rarer than people like to think and sometimes it just gets stuck in a loop. At work the other week someone set it at the task of fixing a bunch of build warnings that had accumulated over the years. It succeeded after burning through tokens to take 30 tries at it. It’s solution after all that hard thinking? It put // @ts-nocheck at the top of every file and called it a day.
But superficially, someone handed it a chore and didn’t have to think about it, and if no one looked deeper, then it was able to get to the desired behavior simply by rerunning the given task over and over without human intervention until it worked. Which is also broadly relatable as there’s a lot of humans in the industry acting broadly the same, but I’ve always been frustrated by those folks anyway.