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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#101

Post by holmesworcester »

deadbabe wrote: post #89
Chabsff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but how do you go about measuring whether a black-box is doing that or not? We don't apply that criteria when evaluating animal intelligence. We sort of take it for granted that humans at large do that, but not via any test that would satisfy an alien. Why should we be imposing white-box constraints to machine intelligence when we can't do so for any other?

There is truly no such thing as a “black box” when it comes to software, there is only a limit to how much patience a human will have in understanding the entire system in all its massive complexity. It’s not like an organic brain.

You wouldn't say this about a message encrypted with AES though, since there's not just a "human patience" limit but also a (we are pretty sure) unbearable computational cost.

We don't know, but it's completely plausible that we might find that the cost of analyzing LLMs in their current form, to the point of removing all doubt about how/what they are thinking, is also unbearably high.

We also might find that it's possible for us (or for an LLM training process itself) to encrypt LLM weights in such a way that the only way to know anything about what it knows is to ask it.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#102

Post by Chabsff »

deadbabe wrote: post #89
Chabsff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but how do you go about measuring whether a black-box is doing that or not? We don't apply that criteria when evaluating animal intelligence. We sort of take it for granted that humans at large do that, but not via any test that would satisfy an alien. Why should we be imposing white-box constraints to machine intelligence when we can't do so for any other?

There is truly no such thing as a “black box” when it comes to software, there is only a limit to how much patience a human will have in understanding the entire system in all its massive complexity. It’s not like an organic brain.

The black box I'm referring to is us.

You can't have it both ways. If your test for whether something is intelligent/thinking or not isn't applicable to any known form of intelligence, then what you are testing for is not intelligence/thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#103

Post by djoldman »

kbelder wrote: post #82
djoldman wrote: post #60

TFA is a part of what seems like a never-ending series about concepts that lack a useful definition. "Thinking" and "intelligence" have no testable definition or specification, therefore it's a complete waste of time to suppose that AI is thinking or intelligent.

Why can't you make the same claim about any other group of humans?

If you mean, "why can't we say that it's a complete waste of time to suppose that" humans are "thinking or intelligent," then yes, I think it is a complete waste of time!

If there's no testable definition, there's no way to say the statement is true or false, nevermind what the implications may be.

It is the same as saying we're all goblethorpy.

It is an absurd question even in the abstract: "prove that you're thinking" ... yea we all have an idea about what that means but it is untestable and it is why this kind of philosophical assertion gets endlessly debated with no real progress.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#104

Post by awestroke »

paxys wrote: post #100
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, with…

Are you claiming humans do anything unprompted? Our biology prompts us to act

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#105

Post by ffwd »

I think something that's missing from AI is the ability humans have to combine and think about ANY sequence of patterns as much as we want. A simple example is say I think about a sequence of "banana - car - dog - house". I can if I want to in my mind, replace car with tree, then replace tree with rainbow, then replace rainbow with something else, etc... I can sit and think about random nonsense for as long as I want and create these endless sequences of thoughts.

Now I think when we're trying to reason about a practical problem or whatever, maybe we are doing pattern recognition via probability and so on, and for a lot of things it works OK to just do pattern recognition, for AI as well.

But I'm not sure that pattern recognition and probability works for creating novel interesting ideas all of the time, and I think that humans can create these endless sequences, we stumble upon ideas that are good, whereas an AI can only see the patterns that are in its data. If it can create a pattern that is not in the data and then recognize that pattern as novel or interesting in some way, it would still lack the flexibility of humans I think, but it would be interesting nevertheless.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#106

Post by IanCal »

paxys wrote: post #100
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, with…

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

They can do this though.

> Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, without any external input?

I don’t see any why not, but then humans don’t have zero input so I’m not sure why that’s useful.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#107

Post by mstipetic »

deadbabe wrote: post #89
Chabsff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but how do you go about measuring whether a black-box is doing that or not? We don't apply that criteria when evaluating animal intelligence. We sort of take it for granted that humans at large do that, but not via any test that would satisfy an alien. Why should we be imposing white-box constraints to machine intelligence when we can't do so for any other?

There is truly no such thing as a “black box” when it comes to software, there is only a limit to how much patience a human will have in understanding the entire system in all its massive complexity. It’s not like an organic brain.

Just because it runs on a computer doesn’t mean it’s “software” in the common meaning of the word

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#108

Post by wry_discontent »

cyrusradfar wrote: post #94

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 specula…

"brain as computer" is just the latest iteration of a line of thinking that goes back forever. Whatever we kinda understand and interact with, that's what we are and what the brain is. Chemicals, electricity, clocks, steam engines, fire, earth; they're all analogies that help us learn but don't necessarily reflect an underlying reality.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#109

Post by bgwalter »

The New Yorker is owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Conde Nast. "Open" "AI" has struck a deal with Conde Nast to feed SearchGPT and ChatGPT.

This piece is cleverly written and might convince laypeople that "AI" may think in the future. I hope the author is being paid handsomely, directly or indirectly.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#110

Post by paxys »

awestroke wrote: post #104
paxys wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, with…

Are you claiming humans do anything unprompted? Our biology prompts us to act

Yet we can ignore our biology, or act in ways that are the opposite of what our biology tells us. Can someone map all internal and external stimuli that a person encounters into a set of deterministic actions? Simply put, we have not the faintest idea how our brains actually work, and so saying saying "LLMs think the same way as humans" is laughable.
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