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LLMs don't have an inner monologue.

By their very nature they only "know" what they have written down and must infer the final answer from that token by token.

They fundamentally can't do certain things such as complex iteration or track back.

When you ask for chain of thought thinking, you allow the LLM to create a "buffer space" and break down the task into more manageable substeps thereby improving the quality of the results.



The Bing LM, or rather the service, did have "inner monologue" in the sense of text that it would generate, but not show to the user, and treat as "thoughts" to guide the generation of an actual reply that the user would see.

We know this because it happily told us, including the json format it uses internally.


Interesting. I didn't know that.

When using gpt-4 directly through the API we can emulate this behavior


And you trust what it told you?


No, but the reconstructed examples have "im_start" and "im_end", which strongly implies that it is, if not verbatim, then a close enough restatement of the real deal. Take a look:

https://www.make-safe-ai.com/is-bing-chat-safe/Prompts_Conve...


Yup, for the same reason I trust e.g. jailbreaks exposing the prompt: it was consistent.

Really, just asking again is a fine way to expose all sorts of "hallucinations" in a LM.


I feel like this can be Implemented in the UI:

First you wrap the user query with "the user asked you: ... . What are the reasoning steps you need?" and then you prompt with "considering `<previous answer>` now answer <user prompt>"

Obviously this is clearly hackable so it would need improvements.


https://youtu.be/Rog9oHtVmjM

Start at 7:30 to see example of backtracking.




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