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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Technology
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Chain of thought is basically garbage.
It works with coding agents because they get an automated hard failure.
The rest of the time it’s just sampling the latent space around a response and should be trimmed out.
That could work with diffusion models but autoregresive models it’s just polluting the context window with the hopes of finding longer tail tokens.
The analogy I use is, it's like a magician pulled a coin from behind a CEO's ear, and their response was "that's incredible! Free money! Let's go into business together!"
Literally no one ever claimed it had reasoning capabilities. It is a trick to produce a string of characters that your brain can make sense of. That's all.
Literally no one ever claimed it had reasoning capabilities
Altman and similar grifters were and are absolutely making those claims but maybe we're excusing them as obvious liars?
They are obvious liars. Some people are just too invested to see it.
These models only have reasoning capabilities using the most obscure definitions of "reasoning". At best, all they're doing are climbing to local maxima with their so-called "reasoning" on a graph as wavy as the ocean.
I've mentioned this on other posts, but it's really sad because LLMs have been wildly incredible for certain NLP operations. They are that though, not AGI or whatever snake oil Altman wants to sell this week.
The CEOs you're talking about are the CEOs in the analogy.
chain-of-thought models
There are no "CoT LLMs", a CoT means externally iterating an LLM. The strength of CoT, resides in its ability to pull up external resources at each iteration, not in dogfooding the LLM its own outputs.
"Researchers" didn't "find out" this now, it was known from day one.
As for who needs to hear it... well, apparently people unable to tell apart an LLM from an AI.
Yes, but it supports the jerk that everything called or associated with AI is bad, so it makes a popular Beehaw post.
a CoT means externally iterating an LLM
Not necessarily. Yes, a chain of thought can be provided externally, for example through user prompting or another source, which can even be another LLM. One of the key observations behind these models commonly referred to as reasoning is that since an external LLM can be used to provide "thoughts", could an LLM provide those steps itself, without depending on external sources?
To do this, it generates "thoughts" around the user's prompt, essentially exploring the space around it and trying different options. These generated steps are added to the context window and are usually much larger that the prompt itself, which is why these models are sometimes referred to as long chain-of-thought models. Some frontends will show a summary of the long CoT, although this is normally not the raw context itself, but rather a version that is summarised and re-formatted.
I think of chain of thought as a self-prompting model
I suspect in the future, chain-of-thought model will run
a smaller tuned/dedicated chain-of-thought submodel
just for the chain-of-thought tokens
The point of this is that, most users aren't very good at
prompting, they just don't have the feel for it
Personally I get worse results, way less what I wanted,
when CoT is enabled, I'm very annoyed that now
the "chatgpt classic" model selector just decides to use CoT
whenever it wants, I should be the one to decide that
and I want it off almost all of the time !!
Admittedly, a lot of people have flawed reasoning too.
The difference being that people do reason, while LLMs don’t.
I've met far too many people I wouldn't trust to give me a reasoned response.
Some people simply lack that capacity entirely, some just don't care enough to spend the effort on it, while others are trying to deceive me intentionally.
LLMs are incapable of reasoning. There is not a consciousness in there deciding and telling you things. My comment was entirely about whether LLMs can reason, not whether all people reason at the same level or might decide to trick you.
I don't disagree with you that LLMs don't reason. I disagree that all Humans can or do reason.
I disagree that all Humans can or do reason.
Well if we're talking about all humans...
But more seriously, it doesn't take much looking to find someone who doesn't reason. Just look on the TV during the next major election and you'll find a bunch.