AI & Abduction

Earlier, I posted about this earlier today, but here are some more really interesting observations from Peter Coy's essay on AI in the (paywalled) New York Times opinion section on how AI uses a process called abduction when it produces responses to what we ask it/prompt it with paragraphs

The paragraphs say something about how AI "thinks" via a process called abduction, which I think is really fascinating.

One hypothesis for how large language models such as o1 think is that they use what logicians call abduction, or abductive reasoning. Deduction is reasoning from general laws to specific conclusions. Induction is the opposite, reasoning from the specific to the general.

Abduction isn’t as well known, but it’s common in daily life, not to mention possibly inside A.I. It’s inferring the most likely explanation for a given observation. Unlike deduction, which is a straightforward procedure, and induction, which can be purely statistical, abduction requires creativity.

Abduction “involves some sort of art (you need to have some talent for it, and you need to develop a certain kind of sensitivity to what makes an explanation a good one),” Igor Douven, a research professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, wrote in an email. (He wrote the entry on abduction for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

Remo Pareschi, an associate professor at the University of Molise in Campobasso, Italy, told me. “Where the situation is complex, but data are scant, abduction is the best approach,” he added in an email.

---

All of this reminds me of the AI named Mike in the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinline.