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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#71

Post by Symmetry »

educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#72

Post by anon291 »

educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

The issue is that we have no means of discussing equality without tossing out the first order logic that most people are accustomed to. Human equality and our own perceptions of other humans as thinking machines is an axiomatic assumption that humans make due to our mind's inner sense perception.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#73

Post by almosthere »

famouswaffles wrote: post #48
almosthere wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code that builds the models and performance inference from it is code we have written. The data in the model is obviously the big trick. But what I'm saying is that if you run inference, that alone does not give it super-powers over your computer. You can write some agentic framework where it WOULD have power over your computer, but that's not what I'm referring to. It's not a living thing inside the computer, it…

You cannot say, 'we know it's not thinking because we wrote the code' when the inference 'code' we wrote amounts to, 'Hey, just do whatever you figured out during training okay'. 'Power over your computer', all that is orthogonal to the point. A human brain without a functioning body would still be thinking.

Well, a model by itself with data that emits a bunch of human written words is literally no different than what JIRA does when it reads a database table and shits it out to a screen, except maybe a lot more GPU usage.

I permit you, that yes, the data in the model is a LOT more cool, but some team could by hand, given billions of years (well probably at least 1 Octillion years), reproduce that model and save it to a disk. Again, no different than data stored in JIRA at that point.

So basically if you have that stance you'd have to agree that when we FIRST invented computers, we created intelligence that is "thinking".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#74

Post by jpnc »

exe34 wrote: post #33
adverbly wrote: post #22

So happy to see Hofstadter referenced! He's the GOAT in my opinion for "thinking about thinking". My own thinking on this is that AI actually IS thinking - but its like the MVB of thinking (minimum viable brain) I find thought experiments the best for this sort of thing: - Imagine you had long term memory loss so couldn't remember back very long You'd still be thinking right? - Next, imagine you go to sleep and lose…

my favourite sport is watching people trying to exclude the possibility of AI thinking/becoming sentient/self-aware/whatever-nebulous-magical-term-you-like. Every single time they manage to exclude a whole section of humanity, because everything that AI "can never do", there are living, breathing people who can't do it either.

There is principle of the matter and then there are exceptions. We say that women can give birth. That holds true in principle even if there are those who can't due to biological failings.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#76

Post by embedding-shape »

deadbabe wrote: post #70
educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

Form ideas without the use of language. For example: imagining how you would organize a cluttered room.

> Form ideas without the use of language.

Don't LLMs already do that? "Language" is just something we've added as a later step in order to understand what they're "saying" and "communicate" with them, otherwise they're just dealing with floats with different values, in different layers, essentially (and grossly over-simplified of course).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#77

Post by everdrive »

This is merely a debate about what it means to "think." We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc.

Now, we do. Partly because of this we don't have really well defined ways to define these terms and think about. Can a handheld calculator think? Certainly, depending on how we define "think."

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#78

Post by IvyMike »

Personally, I feel like human intelligence is "unknown black box" + an LLM.

And the LLM part of our intelligence isn't really thinking.

And some people out there have a very, very small "unknown black box".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#79

Post by embedding-shape »

sys32768 wrote: post #75

Helpful to remember that we humans often say "I think" to mean "I am fairly confident based on my hunch", and in that sense AI is very good at hunching.

Helpful to also remember that humans say "I know" when they empirically might not actually "know" that at all. Not to mention your "know" is different from my "know" and all that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#80

Post by nix0n »

mbesto wrote: post #36
famouswaffles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not write the code that makes it do what it does. We write the code that trains it to figure out how to do what it does. There's a big difference.

I think the discrepancy is this: 1. We trained it on a fraction of the world's information (e.g. text and media that is explicitly online) 2. It carries all of the biases us humans have and worse the biases that are present in the information we chose to explicitly share online (which may or may not be different to the experiences humans have in every day life)

> It carries all of the biases us humans have and worse the biases that are present in the information we chose to explicitly share online

This is going to be a huge problem. Most people assume computers are unbiased and rational, and increasing use of AI will lead to more and larger decisions being made by AI.

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