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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> it can not reason.

As someone with an A-level in philosophy: What is reason?

> I mean of course any kind of normal app. Say Microsoft Paint for example.

The original, or the current one? Ironically, I think either would be a case where ChatGPT works best. The features in a raster graphics tool are very well isolated from each other.

I'd expect ChatGPT to face-plant much more with any meta-level stuff, so a database that doesn't have a 1-1 correspondence with whatever appears in a UI for example.

Or physics sims where you've got several layers of indirection that all need to be correct. I've never been able to get a complete working Navier–Stokes simulator out of it, for example.

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> As someone with an A-level in philosophy: What is reason?

Maybe you are better off answering that question then. But I would define ability to reason as the ability to make logic conclusions based on input from a feedback loop.

Let's use programming as an example.

You write some code you think will work. You run it. It outputs the wrong values. You reason about the code, realize your mistake. Fix the code. Run again. It outputs the correct values.

ChatGPT cannot do any of this. All it can do, is spit out text that it deems probable to belong to previous text it already generated. This is based on probability, but it completely lacks a reasoning part and a feedback loop.

> The original, or the current one? Ironically, I think either would be a case where ChatGPT works best.

Show me a prompt that produces either one.

> ChatGPT cannot do any of this. All it can do, is spit out text that it deems probable to belong to previous text it already generated. This is based on probability, but it completely lacks a reasoning part and a feedback loop.

50% of the time, if you give it source code and an error, it can fix the source code and tell you why. The other half I still get paid for.

> Show me a prompt that produces either one.

K, if I remember by the time I've done the higher priority things, I'll send you a repo with as much of it as I can be arsed to ask for to prove the point, along with the share link to the chat session.

> Show me a prompt that produces either one.

Note how you only need to ask for each feature and in it goes. Sometimes there's a bug or three, but you can generally fix them by describing them.

https://chat.openai.com/share/e2a6b513-c088-449d-8d8f-4f4c73...

I won't ask for the rest of the features, because it's boring.

What I bring to the market right now, might be merely knowing what to ask.

Oh yeah, I said repo as well. Note the commits are copy pasting blindly. I don't do JS professionally, I'm an iOS dev: https://github.com/BenWheatley/JSPaint

You must be kidding right?

Your chat demonstrates most of what I brought up:

* it only spits out snippets

* it cannot produce an app

* it is hallucinating

* it is creating more work than just doing the work yourself

And its a web app, but that's on you for requesting that for some reason.

I asked for a MS Paint app. That would mean something that produce a Windows compatible EXE, not a some html fest.

> I won't ask for the rest of the features, because it's boring.

Or, because it's infeasible and you know it.

Doesn't need answering. All we need to know is that reason requires logic. LLMs do not employ logic, thus they are not able to reason. They sometimes act as if reasonable by happenstance, but fundamentally they are not.

Transformer models are universal, which isn't very surprising given they're made of things which are also universal when configured right, so they absolutely can learn the rules of logic.

Some say that reason requires consciousness, which I'm… frustrated by given the 50 common meanings of the word "consciousness"; but to merely use logic as your standard here?

Why, of all the things people could object to in an LLM, why is logic what people want to pick on? It's the weakest possible objection IMO.

The set of models we're discussing haven't.

You were derailing with "reason" for no reason, so I pointed it out. That doesn't mean logic should be applied as some sort of universal standard.

> The set of models we're discussing haven't.

Haven't what?

> You were derailing with "reason" for no reason

I was quoting someone else who said LLMs can't reason, and I'm asking them what they meant by that because ChatGPT sure acts like it reasons no matter what's going on "inside". I assume the inside to be a Transformer model because otherwise the naming is weird, but whatever it is, it acts like it learned to reason.

And I'm saying that despite wanting this to be a repeat of Clever Hans so I can go back to feeling optimistic about my economic future.

What is reason? No matter.

and what is matter? Never mind.

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