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> You can prod AI systems to think critically

There is no critical thought, you can't prod an LLM to do such a thing. Even CoT is just the LLM producing text that looks like it could be a likely response based on what it generated before.

Sometimes that text looks like critical thought, but it does not at all reflect the logical method or means the AI used to generate it. It's just riffing.

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Sure but there's somebody somewhere who had a relevant critical thought and the LLM can find it and adapt it to your case. That's good enough much of the time.

I think that finding proofs for open mathematical questions should count as critical thought. (See https://medium.com/%40cognidownunder/three-erdős-problems-fe...)

That's impressive, but it isn't thought, anymore than neurons in a dish that learn to play Tetris have thoughts, or if you spent eons painstakingly calculating what the TPU did with the model to come up with the same output tokens, but via pen and paper instead.

When the TPU does it, is the TPU thinking? Where does the critical thinking take place in the endless pages of matrix math that eventually evaluates into the same token output as the TPU?

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