[HN Gopher] Tree of Thoughts
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Tree of Thoughts
        
       Author : kevinslin
       Score  : 138 points
       Date   : 2023-05-26 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | Jeff_Brown wrote:
       | A claim like "improves reasoning by 70%" is too specific to be
       | accompanied by neither a citation nor a definition.
        
         | Imnimo wrote:
         | My guess is that the author misunderstands this quote from the
         | paper abstract:
         | 
         | >For instance, in Game of 24, while GPT-4 with chain-of-thought
         | prompting only solved 4% of tasks, our method achieved a
         | success rate of 74%.
        
       | doctoboggan wrote:
       | This seems really interesting. I am glad many of these tools
       | built up around LLMs allow you to bring your own rather than rely
       | on OpenAI.
        
       | peter_l_downs wrote:
       | The author appears motivated by some... interesting... beliefs.
       | Hard to tell if this entire thing is a joke or not.
       | 
       | https://github.com/kyegomez/EXA#for-humanity
       | 
       | https://blog.apac.ai/liberation-awaits
       | 
       | EDIT: the author seems to be releasing poor implementations of
       | recent papers in an attempt to drive attention towards an AI-
       | related death cult.
        
         | ftxbro wrote:
         | As everyone is saying in replies, it's not so far out there
         | compared to what some more mainstream-seeming AI people think.
         | As one example consider https://tinygrad.org/ it's been
         | featured recently at the top of hacker news a few times
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462337
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065175 (literally the
         | number one top story on hacker news yesterday) well the hacker
         | who made it has some similar quasi-ironic esoteric beliefs like
         | that ('effective accelerationism' and they are on a hero's
         | journey and analogies to religion and NRx dark enlightenment
         | and palladium https://www.palladiummag.com/) on their blog
         | https://geohot.github.io/blog/
        
         | jddj wrote:
         | That github schpeal looks AI generated to be brutally honest
        
         | pizza wrote:
         | What, no mention of Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point? ;) lol.
         | as in - this is isomorphic to the ontology of "technology as
         | the second coming of Christ"
        
         | beowulfey wrote:
         | >From the moment we rise in the morning to the instant our
         | weary heads hit the pillow at night, the inescapable struggle
         | of labor consumes our lives.
         | 
         | Sounds like someone doesn't like their job.
         | 
         | The whole post is amazing -- it reads like stereotypical cult
         | propaganda straight out of science fiction. I definitely expect
         | they'll one day be posting about how we can digitize our
         | consciousness a la "Scratch" from that one Cowboy Bebop episode
         | [1].
         | 
         | [1] https://cowboybebop.fandom.com/wiki/Scratch
        
         | gloryjulio wrote:
         | He has used some warhammer references. It's funny that the
         | title god emperor was also from there and some ppl know it was
         | a joke, but some are indeed treating it seriously
        
         | isoprophlex wrote:
         | Someone has been inhaling too much Roko's Basilisk nonsense...
        
         | turtleyacht wrote:
         | > _grim darkness of the far future_
         | 
         | That's a reference to Warhammer 40k, a popular miniatures
         | wargame from Games Workshop. Their quote is
         | 
         |  _In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war._
         | 
         | It could be kind of satirical, if only to link recent events
         | with the ideas of                 * future technology as
         | impossibly obscure       * a psionic emperor who consumes minds
         | to protect humankind from cosmic         terrors       * tech-
         | priests, who maintain ancient tech       * "machine spirits,"
         | who must be appeased
        
         | api wrote:
         | But after they're dead Roko's Basilisk will restore their
         | digital doppelgangers and place them in a paradise run by
         | superintelligences embodied within the quantum spin states of
         | carbon atoms in a diamond lattice that will continue to exist
         | until the heat death of the universe.
        
         | enlyth wrote:
         | The author is a teenager, it's not unusual to have overly
         | idealistic views at that age. Not trying to be ageist here or
         | attacking the author's work, just saying I wouldn't worry too
         | much about "AI death cults"
        
         | alephxyz wrote:
         | Yep, I fell for it this week. Spent an hour fixing typos and
         | minor bugs in their code before taking a step back and
         | realising most of it was flawed.
         | 
         | What I believe they're doing is feeding papers to a LLM as soon
         | as they come out in order to get a repo they can advertise.
         | Once someone releases a working implementation they just copy
         | it over.
         | 
         | I was able to generate almost identical code to what they
         | released by giving chatgpt pseudocode copied verbatim from the
         | original paper.
        
         | jxy wrote:
         | Glory to Mankind
        
         | 90minuteAPI wrote:
         | Seems likely that they're submitting here as Reclaimer. The
         | single comment on these submissions has that same fervent
         | religious writing style as the readme on that EXA repo, itself
         | just a fork of an "awesome-multimodal-ml" collection:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Reclaimer
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | low_tech_punk wrote:
         | Any sufficiently advanced AI research is indistinguishable from
         | religion
        
         | hutzlibu wrote:
         | "Hard to tell if this entire thing is a joke or not."
         | 
         | Why the theological meta discussion at all?
         | 
         | Is the thing he talks about actually working, is it improving
         | AI output like he claims, or not?
         | 
         | "that Elevates Model Reasoning by atleast 70% "
         | 
         | I am doubtful, but I don't have the tools to investigate it on
         | my mobile, but this is the debate I would like to read about
         | and not potential obscure believes of the developer.
        
           | gremlinsinc wrote:
           | while the author sounds cookie, so did that genius who went
           | crazy or something and built toweros, I don't know how well
           | his implementation works but if you think about it the idea
           | of tree if thought over the other methods does sort of make
           | sense, that's essentially what Autogpt tries to do but with
           | different agents.
           | 
           | I think if you could find a way to add better contexts and
           | memories, and combine some LoRA to perfect a model on a
           | specific vertical, you could essentially have a (nearly) full
           | AGI topically that essentially is an expert and doesn't
           | hallucinate(mostly)... maybe a 2 to 3x multiplier on gpt4. I
           | mean I'm a year it'll probably be even more insane what's
           | available.
           | 
           | look at the transition of Midjourney v1 to v5 in a single
           | year.
           | 
           | It's been a wild year for ai. the experiment where they
           | hooked a bunch of Sims up together with ai, also used
           | something similar to this I think, in creating thought chains
           | from multiple agents.
           | 
           | Tldr: crazy or not, the idea of using a branching system to
           | get better results does make some sense, so it's not
           | completely bunk or anything, IMHO. At least the concept,
           | can't speak for this specific implementation.
           | 
           | Edit: I guess, I skimmed and misread the room. I was thinking
           | this guy was part of the original paper and implementation.
           | he's not, which does award him more skepticism etc. My bad.
        
         | typon wrote:
         | This is what people at OpenAI believe but say it in a much more
         | palatable way.
        
         | sebzim4500 wrote:
         | I think these are pretty typical beliefs among AI researchers,
         | they don't normally write it down on github though.
        
           | jamilton wrote:
           | How typical are you thinking? I'd guess less than 10%,
           | there's a lot of AI researchers and this is just one strain
           | of thought.
        
             | missosoup wrote:
             | For those 'in the know' a lot more typical than you would
             | think. If we don't reach at least Kardashev scale 1 in the
             | next hundred years or so, we're going to go extinct due to
             | several now-predictable factors.
             | 
             | And an unchained LLM trained on reality is far more capable
             | of finding solutions to that problem than a bunch of
             | squabbling politicians.
        
               | pupperino wrote:
               | > And an unchained LLM trained on reality is far more
               | capable of finding solutions to that problem than a bunch
               | of squabbling politicians.
               | 
               | Not that I disagree with this statement, I don't, but
               | this is not a silver bullet. Technology is, ultimately,
               | operated by humans and no amount of frontier research and
               | development can overcome collective action problems. At
               | some point, you do have to sit down with these stupid
               | politicians and get everyone on board. The loom was
               | invented hundreds of years before the industrial
               | revolution, in fact it was nearly forgotten and the
               | designed survived due to a few happy accidents. It was
               | only after the English Civil War and the establishment of
               | checks on royal power that widespread adoption was
               | possible.
        
               | klik99 wrote:
               | I can see this in Minsky time period AI research, but
               | surely with the number of people getting into AI and
               | coming from a purely practical right now I would expect
               | that mindset to be diluted. As someone not in the know I
               | could very well be wrong.
               | 
               | In response to the coming apocalypse, this isn't the
               | first time everyone has a vague sense of potential doom
               | about the future. I believe this happens during any time
               | of fundamental change, making the future uncertain which
               | we interpret as apocalyptical. Back during the 30 years
               | war that apocalyptic belief manifested as God being angry
               | with us, today it's with the (very real) problems our
               | rapid industrialization has created. Not to minimize the
               | problems that we face - well minimizing only in that they
               | probably won't lead to extinction. The various
               | predictable factors mentioned have the potential to make
               | life really shitty and cause massive causalities.
               | 
               | While framing these issues as a matter of extinction may
               | feel like a way of adding urgency to dealing with these
               | problems, instead it's contributing, on an individual
               | level, to fracturing our society - we all "know" an
               | apocalypse is coming but we're fighting over what is
               | actually causing that apocalypse. Except that there will
               | be no apocalypse - it's just a fear of the unknown,
               | something is fundamentally changing in the world and we
               | have no idea how the cards will land. It's no different
               | than a fear of the dark.
        
             | sebzim4500 wrote:
             | He's on the extreme end but way more than 10% believe that
             | AGI will be a technological breakthrough on the same level
             | as fire.
        
         | zoogeny wrote:
         | It is worth watching Yuval Noah Harari's recent talk at
         | Frontiers Forum. [1]
         | 
         | In it he details the possibility of AI being used to create new
         | religions that are so powerful and persuasive that they will be
         | irresistible. Consider how QAnon caught on, despite pretty much
         | anyone on HN being able to see it as a fraud. Most people are
         | thinking about how AI will impact politics but I am really
         | interested in how it will impact spirituality.
         | 
         | I've been rabbit-holing on last centuries New Age cult scene
         | like Manly P. Hall and Rudolph Steiner. Even more respectable
         | figures like Alan Watts were involved in some ... interesting
         | ... endeavors like Esalen institute.
         | 
         | We are over-due for a new kind of spirituality. My bet is that
         | AI is going to bring it whether we want it or not.
         | 
         | 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWiM-
         | LuRe6w&ab_channel=Yuval...
        
           | joshka wrote:
           | Including the standard Slashdot line: "I for one welcome our
           | XXXX overlords" in the training corpus was a mistake we
           | should have seen coming.
        
         | akomtu wrote:
         | Why do you call it a "AI death cult"? It looks like an utopia
         | to me. At first everyone will love AI for eliminating labor and
         | diseases. They'll even create the Church of AI with symbolism
         | and dogmas. Later people will get bored of their easy lifestyle
         | and someone will suggest to give AI an identity, its own
         | opinion, in order to solve the gravest problem of all:
         | overpopulation. The new AI will quickly realise that it has no
         | connection to all those bipods, but they can be put to some
         | use. By that time AI will be so embedded into social fabric
         | that fighting it will be like fighting electricity.
        
           | yard2010 wrote:
           | The solution to over population is really simple, we don't
           | need an AI for this. It's not popular tho..
        
         | GreedClarifies wrote:
         | It is a little extreme, but AI seems like it will be a powerful
         | tool and will increase the rate of technological progress.
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | Ya I don't quite understand the groups that behave like "ya
           | ok we'll get AGI, but nothing is going to change from what we
           | have now".
           | 
           | The industrial revolution massively changed the world and the
           | speed at which its changes occurred were positively slow
           | compared to what we can do today. Imagine you could develop
           | the steam engine then press a button and they could print one
           | out in India, the US, and France in hours. WWI would have
           | looked a lot different, as in it would have been even bigger
           | in scope.
        
       | startupsfail wrote:
       | Checking, if GPT could be improved by running it multiple times
       | is a good idea.
       | 
       | The answer to that is - yes, but it is: costly, slow, there is
       | node collapse, it impacts context length, it injects biases.
        
         | nate wrote:
         | I constantly ask chatGPT: "are you sure?" to it's replies, and
         | it almost always corrects a mistake it made that I've spotted.
        
       | GreedClarifies wrote:
       | This path feels correct to me. It feel like what we do as humans
       | and seems like a reasonable way to start to construct "mode 2"
       | thinking.
       | 
       | IDK if our current models have enough of "mode 1" to power this
       | system. It's also plausible that our current "mode 1" systems are
       | _more than powerful enough_ and that inference speed (and thus
       | the size /depth of the tree that can be explored) will be the
       | most important factor.
       | 
       | I hope that the major players are looking at this and trying it
       | out at scale (I know Deepmind wrote the orginal paper, but their
       | benchmarks were quite unimpressive). It's plausible that we will
       | have an AlphaGo moment with this scheme.
        
         | gglon wrote:
         | Andrej Karpathy would agree - recent talk:
         | https://youtu.be/bZQun8Y4L2A
        
           | GreedClarifies wrote:
           | Uhm wow. I was just talking about my feelings on the topic.
           | I'm guessing he has _way_ more data (and knowledge).
           | 
           | Better lucky than good!
           | 
           | (also, man he's awesome. How does he have such a strong grasp
           | on all of the topics in the field?)
        
         | sdwr wrote:
         | Yeah looks very promising. Naively, it multiplies computation
         | time by a factor of 20x though? If they are taking 5x samples
         | per step, and multiple steps per problem.
         | 
         | https://imgur.com/a/VbpQZRm
         | 
         | As this gets explored further, I believe we will start finding
         | out why human minds are constructed the way they are, from the
         | practical/necessity direction. Seems like the next step is
         | farming out subtasks to smaller models, and adding an
         | orthogonal dimension of emotionality to help keep track of
         | state.
        
           | GreedClarifies wrote:
           | I'm sympathetic to the idea of new types of specialized
           | models to assist in this effort. We're using our one hammer
           | for all problems.
           | 
           | In particular, it jumps out that a "ranking model"
           | (different, I think from current ranking models) to judge
           | which paths to take and which nodes to trim would make some
           | level of sense.
        
           | joshka wrote:
           | Not sure if it's relevant, but the OpenAI APIs generally
           | support taking multiple responses in a single API call. I'm
           | unsure what the generalized effect on processing time of that
           | is however. From what I've read, this is sub-linear, so could
           | reasonably be more effective than 20x, and I'd bet there are
           | probably speedups to be had on the model side of this that
           | make the extra time cost negligible.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | I believe you are correct here, yet at the same time I think
         | we're about 2 orders of magnitude off on the amount of compute
         | power needed to do it effectively.
         | 
         | I think the first order of mag will be in tree of thought
         | processing. The amount of additional queries we need to run to
         | get this to work is at least 10x, but I don't believe 100x.
         | 
         | I think the second order of mag will be multimodal inference so
         | the models can ground themselves in 'reality' data. Saying,
         | "the brick layed on the ground and did not move" and "the brick
         | floated away" are only deciable based on the truthfulness of
         | all the other text corpus it's looked at. At least to me it
         | gets even more interesting when you tie it into environmental
         | data that is more likely to be factual, such as massive amounts
         | of video.
        
       | xg15 wrote:
       | > _This is an plug in and play version, connect your own models
       | and enjoy superintelligence!
       | 
       | Share this repository by clicking on the following buttons!
       | <smiley face>_
       | 
       | 2023 in a nutshell.
        
       | dventimihasura wrote:
       | You buried the lede:
       | 
       | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10601.pdf
        
         | doctoboggan wrote:
         | @dang, I think the submission should be changed to this link so
         | the discussion is about the concept "Tree of Thoughts" and not
         | the current OP's personal beliefs.
        
           | MacsHeadroom wrote:
           | Seconded
        
         | neuronexmachina wrote:
         | I'm a little confused about what the relation is (if any)
         | between the OP link and the repo from that paper:
         | https://github.com/ysymyth/tree-of-thought-llm
         | 
         | Is it basically a reimplementation using Guidance instead of
         | openai's API directly?
        
       | amrb wrote:
       | Good talk on the paper
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut5kp56wW_4
        
         | tehsauce wrote:
         | This is a great in depth and sober analysis.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | It'd be nice to include a few example uses and it's outputs vs
       | other prompt methods.
        
       | flakiness wrote:
       | Note that the repo author != the paper author.
       | 
       | The research itself [1] seems legit. The paper author also wrote
       | a paper called ReAct [2], which is one of the core components of
       | the langchain framework.
       | 
       | * [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601 * [2]
       | https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629
        
         | thawab wrote:
         | here is the repo by the paper author:
         | 
         | https://github.com/ysymyth/tree-of-thought-llm
        
         | joshka wrote:
         | Interestingly a 2 days prior to
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601, someone released
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08291
         | 
         | > Large Language Model Guided Tree-of-Thought > In this paper,
         | we introduce the Tree-of-Thought (ToT) framework, a novel
         | approach aimed at improving the problem-solving capabilities of
         | auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). The ToT technique
         | is inspired by the human mind's approach for solving complex
         | reasoning tasks through trial and error. In this process, the
         | human mind explores the solution space through a tree-like
         | thought process, allowing for backtracking when necessary. To
         | implement ToT as a software system, we augment an LLM with
         | additional modules including a prompter agent, a checker
         | module, a memory module, and a ToT controller. In order to
         | solve a given problem, these modules engage in a multi-round
         | conversation with the LLM. The memory module records the
         | conversation and state history of the problem solving process,
         | which allows the system to backtrack to the previous steps of
         | the thought-process and explore other directions from there. To
         | verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique, we
         | implemented a ToT-based solver for the Sudoku Puzzle.
         | Experimental results show that the ToT framework can
         | significantly increase the success rate of Sudoku puzzle
         | solving. Our implementation of the ToT-based Sudoku solver is
         | available on GitHub:
         | 
         | I don't recall whether it was this paper, or another that I
         | read that talks about using the LLM's ability to also show the
         | probabilities of each token to measure the validity of the
         | particular completions. However that isn't exposed in the
         | OpenAI chat APIs (GPT-Turbo-3.5 / GPT-4), just the completions
         | APIs (Text-Davinci-003 etc.)
        
       | tyropita wrote:
       | Documentation looks really neat and in-depth, always appreciated.
       | Looks like you're missing a .gitignore file. Folders like
       | __pycache__ don't need to be checked in.
        
       | rahimnathwani wrote:
       | Here are the prompts templates from the main code:
       | prompt = f"Given the current state of reasoning: '{state_text}',
       | pessimitically evaluate its value as a float between 0 and 1
       | based on it's potential to achieve {inital_prompt}"
       | prompt = f"Write down your observations in format
       | 'Observation:xxxx', then write down your thoughts in format
       | 'Thoughts:xxxx Given the current state of reasoning:
       | '{state_text}', generate {k} coherent solutions to achieve
       | {state_text}"            prompt = f"Given the current state of
       | reasoning: '{state_text}', pessimistically evaluate its value as
       | a float between 0 and 1 based on its potential to achieve
       | {initial_prompt}"            self.ReAct_prompt = "Write down your
       | observations in format 'Observation:xxxx', then write down your
       | thoughts in format 'Thoughts:xxxx'."            prompt = f"Given
       | the current state of reasoning: '{state_text}', generate {1}
       | coherent thoughts to achieve the reasoning process: {state_text}"
       | prompt = f"Given the current state of reasoning: '{state_text}',
       | evaluate its value as a float between 0 and 1, become very
       | pessimistic think of potential adverse risks on the probability
       | of this state of reasoning achieveing {inital_prompt} and DO NOT
       | RESPOND WITH ANYTHING ELSE: OTHER THAN AN FLOAT"
       | prompt = f"Given the following states of reasoning, vote for the
       | best state utilizing an scalar value
       | 1-10:\n{states_text}\n\nVote, on the probability of this state of
       | reasoning achieveing {inital_prompt} and become very pessimistic
       | very NOTHING ELSE"            self.ReAct_prompt =
       | '''{{#assistant~}}         {{gen 'Observation' temperature=0.5
       | max_tokens=50}}         {{~/assistant}}'''
       | 
       | There are also some system prompts:
       | https://github.com/kyegomez/tree-of-thoughts/blob/732791710e...
        
         | sdwr wrote:
         | That's that self-awareness shit! We superintelligent now.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdSIngO0ivk
        
           | rahimnathwani wrote:
           | Yeah maybe we should hook this up to a chat interface, and
           | let a human take the place of the LLM.
        
             | sdwr wrote:
             | That would be neat. Flip the script, have an AI manager
             | instead of AI assistant. It could:
             | 
             | - keep track of todo items
             | 
             | - assist with progress
             | 
             | - check in on mental + emotional state
             | 
             | and down the road
             | 
             | - keep track of state over time
             | 
             | - give feedback/make observations
             | 
             | The paradigm shift is having it contact us, instead of the
             | other way around. The ToT model has 1 additional parameter
             | on top of the LLM - probability of success. What would the
             | parameters be for a more open-ended conversation?
        
               | rahimnathwani wrote:
               | "What would the parameters be for a more open-ended
               | conversation"
               | 
               | Engagement! Just like social media!
        
       | rahimnathwani wrote:
       | Another use of ideas from the same paper, but this time to
       | produce lesson plans for an AI tutor:
       | 
       | https://github.com/JushBJJ/Mr.-Ranedeer-AI-Tutor/tree/testin...
        
       | raydiatian wrote:
       | > This implementation of Tree of Thoughts is brought to you by
       | Agora, Agora advances Humanity with open source SOTA Multi-
       | Modality AI research! We plan on combating Humanity's grandest
       | root problems like food insecurity, planetary insecurity, and
       | disease, and hopefully death itself.
       | 
       | Wow. Lick, don't sniff, the fresh paint.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | >We plan on combating Humanity's grandest root problems like
         | food insecurity, planetary insecurity, and disease, and
         | hopefully death itself.
         | 
         | If everyone is dead, you don't have to worry about death, or
         | any of those other pesky hard to solve problems!
        
           | 082349872349872 wrote:
           | > _Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral,
           | working on the thing can drive you mad. That 's what happened
           | to this friend of mine._ -- JFP
        
       | ChrisAlexiuk wrote:
       | https://youtu.be/bjnTy2TdmYw
       | 
       | I went through this in a video using the paper's official code -
       | and it worked fairly well!
       | 
       | Definitely a great step forward in terms of reasoning tasks -
       | even if it is an expensive step.
        
       | emmanueloga_ wrote:
       | Similar in concept to the magi supercomputer? :-p [1]
       | 
       | 1: https://aminoapps.com/c/neon-genesis-
       | evangelion/page/item/ma...
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-26 23:00 UTC)