The Case That A.I. Is Thinking • Hacker News Board

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#91

Post by deadbabe » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #76

deadbabe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

LLMs don’t form ideas at all. They search vector space and produce output, sometimes it can resemble ideas if you loop into itself.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#92

Post by jjcm » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

So much of the debate of whether AI can think or not reminds me of this scene from The Next Generation: https://youtu.be/ol2WP0hc0NY

LLMs hit two out of the three criteria already - self awareness and intelligence, but we're in a similar state where defining consciousness is such a blurry metric. I feel like it wont be a binary thing, it'll be a group decision by humanity. I think it will happen in the next decade or two, and regardless of the outcome I'm excited I'll be alive to see it. It'll be such a monumentous achievement by humanity. It will drastically change our perspective on who we are and what our role is in the universe, especially if this new life form surpasses us.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#93

Post by amarant » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

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…

solve simple maths problems, for example the kind found in the game 4=10 [1]

Doesn't necessarily have to reliably solve them, some of them are quite difficult, but llms are just comically bad at this kind of thing.

Any kind of novel-ish(can't just find the answers in the training-data) logic puzzle like this is, in my opinion, a fairly good benchmark for "thinking".

Until a llm can compete with a 10 year old child in this kind of task, I'd argue that it's not yet "thinking". A thinking computer ought to be at least that good at maths after all.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.fourequals...

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#94

Post by cyrusradfar » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

I think the challenge with many of these conversations is that they assume consciousness emerges through purely mechanical means.

The “brain as a computer” metaphor has been useful in limited contexts—especially for modeling memory or signal processing; but, I don’t think it helps us move forward when talking about consciousness itself.

Penrose and Hameroff’s quantum consciousness hypothesis, while still very speculative, is interesting precisely because it suggests that consciousness may arise from phenomena beyond classical computation. If that turns out to be true, it would also mean today’s machines—no matter how advanced—aren’t on a path to genuine consciousness.

That said, AI doesn’t need to think to be transformative.

Steam engines weren’t conscious either, yet they reshaped civilization.

Likewise, AI and robotics can bring enormous value without ever approaching human-level awareness.

We can hold both ideas at once: that machines may never be conscious, and still profoundly useful.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#95

Post by multiplegeorges » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

AI is thinking the same way a film's picture actually moves.

It's an illusion that's good enough that our brains accept it and it's a useful tool.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#96

Post by gf000 » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

prmph wrote: post #67

myrmidon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you consider it sentient? Absolutely. If you simulated a human brain by the atom, would you think the resulting construct would NOT be? What would be missing? I think consciousness is simply an emergent property of our nervous system, but in order to express itself "language" is obviously needed and thus requires lots of complexity (more than what we typically see in animals or computer systems until recently…

> If you simulated a human brain by the atom, That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning" And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement…

Well, if you were to magically make an exact replica of a person, wouldn't it be conscious and at time 0 be the same person?

But later on, he would get different experiences and become a different person no longer identical to the first.

In extension, I would argue that magically "translating" a person to another medium (e.g. a chip) would still make for the same person, initially.

Though the word "magic" does a lot of work here.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#97

Post by blacksmith_tb » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

jjcm wrote: post #92

So much of the debate of whether AI can think or not reminds me of this scene from The Next Generation: https://youtu.be/ol2WP0hc0NY LLMs hit two out of the three criteria already - self awareness and intelligence, but we're in a similar state where defining consciousness is such a blurry metric. I feel like it wont be a binary thing, it'll be a group decision by humanity. I think it will happen in the next decade or…

Self-awareness is a bold claim, as opposed to the illusion of it. LLMs are very good at responding in a way that suggests there's a self, but I am skeptical that proves much about whether they actually have interior states analogous to what we recognize in humans as selfhood...

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#98

Post by Flere-Imsaho » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

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.

So the question is: when will ai hunching produce better results than humans?

IMHO not too long now given the rate of improvements.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#99

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

heresie-dabord wrote: post #63

ivraatiems wrote: post #18

The author searches for a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans," but to me it seems almost trivially true that both are possible. What I mean by that is that I think there is a good chance that LLMs are similar to a subsystem of human thinking. They are great at pattern recognition and prediction, which is a huge part of cognition. What they are not is conscious, or…

> a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans" LLMs (AIs) are not useless. But they do not actually think . What is trivially true is that they do not actually need to think . (As far as the Turing Test, Eliza patients, and VC investors are concerned, the point has been proven.) If the technology is helping us write text and code, it is by definition useful . > In 2003, t…

> But they do not actually think.

I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted.

With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process. You can see them pattern-match to determine a strategy to attack a problem, go through it piece-by-piece, revisit assumptions, reformulate strategy, and then consolidate findings to produce a final result.

If that's not thinking, I literally don't know what is. It's the same process I watch my own brain use to figure something out.

So I have to ask you: when you claim they don't think -- what are you basing this on? What, for you, is involved in thinking that the kind of process I've just described is missing? Because I genuinely don't know what needs to be added here for it to become "thinking".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#100

Post by paxys » Mon, Nov 03, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

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…

Don't be sycophantic. Disagree and push back when appropriate.

Come up with original thought and original ideas.

Have long term goals that aren't programmed by an external source.

Do something unprompted.

The last one IMO is more complex than the rest, because LLMs are fundamentally autocomplete machines. But what happens if you don't give them any prompt? Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, without any external input?