alt Hacker NewsConfirmatory of Sutskever's view that predicting the next token forces a deep understanding. To effectively predict the next token it needs a good idea of what comes after the next token.
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Isn't that what "Attention is all you need" was about anyway? Does not sound like news to me.
> To effectively predict the next token it needs a good idea of what comes after the next token.
And that's all it needs. Not reasoning.
I think that's reading a little too much into it. The paper shows the hidden states contain signals about whether the code is good right now, and whether the run is probably going to work out. That's interesting, for sure. But it doesn't mean the model has some detailed idea of what it's going to write 25 steps later.
A lot of that signal could be much simpler stuff. This task is hard. The agent seems stuck. The tests are getting better. The current approach looks promising. All of those things make future success easier to predict without the model actually "knowing what comes next" in any strong sense.
Also, their 25 steps are agent turns, not 25 code edits. The median run had something like 52 steps but only two edits, and the program label stays the same between edits. So "25 steps ahead" may sometimes just mean basically the same codebase, with a bunch of reading and test output in between.
So yeah, I'd say it's consistent with Sutskever's view. But "consistent with" and "confirmatory of" are doing very different amounts of work here.
If you want to take it that far, we've had results like this since the 60s (solomonoff induction). But of course if you state it like that, your (rightful) objection is that it's pretty vacuous (if I had the computational omniscience to just brute force all possible turing machines, whatever that even means, then sure, any 'f' gets subsumed into this paradigm).
A lot of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, etc. effectively say, "Yeah, everything's just f(inputs of world) -> outputs!" That 'f' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Which is kind of the point of mechanistic interperability - to make sure we're not jumping ahead of ourselves, and to make sure we're careful when we claim what "deep" and "structure" means, when it pertains to that 'f'.