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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

No reason why Toolformer+GPT couldn't use a symbolic reasoning program. Symbolic reasoning programs are much better than humans.

Probably bugs will happen in the interface between human language and the symbolic reasoning. But that happens with humans too.

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I work in this field and have tried many things. Sure.. GPT + something else can do symbolic reasoning almost on par with a middle schooler (it gets things wrongs often, not in the way people do either, but just confidently incorrect). However, GPT + something is not a transformer model, which is what the original comment was about.

GPT-4 has toolformer capabilities as emergent properties, so using it in combination with toolformer is really unnecessary.

This is true too. Even chatGPT can learn some tool use in-context. See https://twitter.com/minosvasilias/status/1627076214639976449

GPT-4 writes some wicked complicated (but correct!) SQL if given a schema and a relevant task:

https://gist.github.com/int19h/428cea1d87dfc389b99de1b79727f...

What I found really amazing about this particular experiment is that the schema I gave it didn't contain any information that could be used to query for things like distances between places, and yet it came up with the idea of using settlements' culture as a proxy to determine "border fiefs", completely unprompted (and yes, it actually is a very effective proxy for this particular case!).

I wonder now what it would do with Prolog - or maybe Datalog for simplicity? - although that might depend on how much of it there is in the training data. Do you know if anyone tried it yet?

That's wild.

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