Notwithstanding Anything Contained Herein

Are AI Agents Capable of Abductive Reasoning? I Tried to Find Out.

July 8, 2025, 1:09 p.m.

While there's debate about whether AI agents are capable of deductive reasoning (verdict: close enough), and inductive reasoning (verdict: situationally), there's no chatter that I've seen on whether AI agents are capable of a third kind of reasoning, abductive reasoning. So, I devised an informal test. Spoiler: no, not yet.

#llms

Goldilocks and the Three LLMs

Aug. 23, 2023, 11:03 a.m.

LLMs generate text creatively but also adhere to literal or factual information when prompted. By mixing creative variability with literal information, current on-the-market LLMs manipulate us into applying theory of mind to things that don’t have one. This manipulation is decisively to their advantage, but probably not the user’s.

#information_extraction #nlp #chatgpt #llms

Creativity vs Wrongness: The Case of ChatGPT

Feb. 22, 2023, 10:05 a.m.

ChatGPT is a genuine advance: a truly general, intention-comprehending generative interactive agent that has captured the attention of the AI space. However, the widely-held pernicious assumption of monotonically increasing AI performance borne of inevitable hype creates the flawed expectation that we are just iterations away from something that won’t make (many) mistakes. But the history of AI development is littered with genuine advances made right into dead ends.

#chatgpt #llms

The Real Dunning-Kruger Fools

Dec. 17, 2021, 10:53 a.m.

The Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t real. We should all be more skeptical of social science, especially pop psychology favorites. The real fools of Dunning-Kruger are those who have uncritically trusted social science, or lacked the curiosity to investigate and think critically about the actual research.

#academia

On Chinese Rooms, Roman Numerals, and Neural Networks

Dec. 9, 2021, 10:46 a.m.

As an acquaintance of mine used to say: “all models are wrong.” All models, among them neural networks, are also just tools, albeit very useful, very powerful tools. They do not necessarily come to learn or say anything of significance about whatever question they are put to. We should resist the temptation to imbue them with significance or to misunderstand their utility.

#networks #machine learning #deep learning

Alex Schumacher

I blog about financial contracts and language, and sometimes financial contracts or language. Also, NLP and data science (and, "AI", reluctantly).