Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…There was some research from Google in 2023 or 2024 where they tried to apply tree structures to reasoning. The jury is still out as to whether this can ever work. We probably will see a revisiting of this idea of forward search in the future. But there are two things that make MCTS very simple for Go. Value estimation is concrete. You can determine it for real, and then you can use it to truncate depth, as you said. The breadth is also determined. What’s critical is that the action selection algorithm, where you iteratively visit and grow the tree, is well suited for the size and depth of problem that Go is. But for something like LLM reasoning, PUCT might not be a good enough heuristic. It might be too greedy with local tokens, and it might only give you obvious thoughts that are correct but don’t really solve your final problem. I would say the jury is probably still out on what the final instantiation of reasoning for LLMs will look like. I wouldn’t rule out that this stuff could come back, but it’s a bit hard. Don’t LLMs natively learn to do MCTS, where they’ll try an approach and be like, “Oh, that doesn’t work. Let’s back up. Let’s try this other thing,” and then go in the direction that proves to be more fruitful? Certainly, LLMs manage to do something that looks like real human reasoning without having to do an explicit tree structure. That being said, I think the idea of doing forward search and simulation to get a better sense of what is valuable might make a comeback, even if not in exactly the same instantiation as AlphaGo.…

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