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Large-scale AI language systems display an emergent ability to reason by analogy

Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, as it enables us to flexibly solve new problems without extensive practice. By using a wide range of tests, we demonstrate that GPT-3, a large-scale artificial intelligence language model, is capable of solving difficult analogy problems at a level comparable to human performance.

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Fig. 1: Analogy test results in GPT-3 and human participants.

References

  1. Holyoak, K.J. in Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (eds Holyoak, K. J. & Morrison, R. G.) 234–259 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012). A book chapter that summarizes work in cognitive science on analogical reasoning.

  2. Brown, T. et al. Language models are few-shot learners. In Adv. Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (eds Larochelle, H. et al.) 1877–1901 (Curran Associates, 2020). This paper describes GPT-3, the AI system that was evaluated in the present work.

  3. Raven, J. C. Progressive Matrices: A Perceptual Test of Intelligence, Individual Form (Lewis Raven, 1938). A visual analogy problem set that is commonly used as a test of problem-solving skills.

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This is a summary of: Webb, T. et al. Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01659-w (2023).

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Large-scale AI language systems display an emergent ability to reason by analogy. Nat Hum Behav 7, 1426–1427 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01671-0

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