I stumbled on the paper the article talks about on /r/LocalLlama (this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1l6ibwg/when_yo...)

I found this comment to be relevant: "Keep in mind this whitepaper is really just Apple circling the wagons because they have dick for proprietary AI tech."

When you question the source, it really does raise eyebrows, especially as an Apple shareholder: that these Apple employees are busy not working on their own AI programme that's now insanely far behind other big tech companies, but are instead spending their time casting shade on the reasoning models developed at other AI labs.

What's the motivation here, really? The paper itself isn't particularly insightful or ground-breaking.

I found the paper to be disingenuous almost to the point of sour grapes.

It completely ignores the glaringly obvious probability that since AI is trained on artifacts of human behavior and culture, on the internet, and by and large people on the internet are unlikely to spend beyond a trivial amount of time and complexity answering a query, of course just throwing one’s hands up as too hard-won’t solve is the conditioned response. It is by far the most likely human response to solving ten disk TOH as well.

LLMs are human culture compiled into code. They will strongly tend to follow patterns of human behavior, to the point of that being their main (only?) feature.

I'm seriously fed up with all this fact-free AI hype. Whenever an LLM regurgitates training data, it's heralded as the coming of AGI. Whenever it's shown that they can't solve any novel problem, the research is in bad faith (but please make sure to publish the questions so that the next model version can solve them -- of course completely by chance).

Here's a quote from the article:

> How many humans can sit down and correctly work out a thousand Tower of Hanoi steps? There are definitely many humans who could do this. But there are also many humans who can’t. Do those humans not have the ability to reason? Of course they do! They just don’t have the conscientiousness and patience required to correctly go through a thousand iterations of the algorithm by hand. (Footnote: I would like to sit down all the people who are smugly tweeting about this with a pen and paper and get them to produce every solution step for ten-disk Tower of Hanoi.)

In case someone imagines that fancy recursive reasoning is necessary to solve the Towers of Hanoi, here's the algorithm to move 10 (or any even number of) disks from peg A to peg C:

1. Move one disk from peg A to peg B or vice versa, whichever move is legal.

2. Move one disk from peg A to peg C or vice versa, whichever move is legal.

3. Move one disk from peg B to peg C or vice versa, whichever move is legal.

4. Goto 1.

Second-graders can follow that, if motivated enough.

There's now constant, nonstop, obnoxious shouting on every channel about how these AI models have solved the Turing test (one wonders just how stupid these "evaluators" were), are at the level of junior devs (LOL), and actually already have "PhD level" reasoning capabilities.

I don't know who is supposed to be fooled -- we have access to these things, we can try them. One can easily knock out any latest version of GPT-PhD-level-model-of-the-week with a trivial question. Nothing fundamentally changed about that since GPT-2.

The hype and the observable reality are now so far apart that one really has to wonder: Are people this easily gullible? Or do so many people in tech benefit from the hype train that they don't want to rain on the parade?

The painful thing about achieving AGI, is that humans reasoning about AI will seem so dumb.

I'm not sure about the paper and claims on the whole but the Hanoi part has received some shade here https://x.com/scaling01/status/1931783050511126954