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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#121

Post by xienze »

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…

> "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?"

Invent some novel concept, much the same way scientists and mathematicians of the distant past did? I doubt Newton's brain was simply churning out a stream of the "next statistically probable token" until -- boom! Calculus. There was clearly a higher order understanding of many abstract concepts, intuition, and random thoughts that occurred in his brain in order to produce something entirely new.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#122

Post by iammjm »

jstanley wrote: post #87
plufz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have needs and feelings? (I mean we can’t KNOW that they don’t and we know of this case of an LLM in experiment that try to avoid being shutdown, but I think the evidence of feeling seems weak so far)

But you can have needs and feelings even without doing thinking. It's separate.

I can imagine needing without thinking (like being hungry), but feelings? How and in what space would that even manifest? Like where would such a sensation like, say, sadness reside?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#123

Post by mft_ »

Personal take: LLMs are probably part of the answer (to AGI?) but are hugely handicapped by their current architecture: the only time that long-term memories are formed is during training, and everything after that (once they're being interacted with) sits only in their context window, which is the equivalent of fungible, fallible, lossy short-term memory. [0] I suspect that many things they currently struggle with can be traced back to this.

Overcome this fundamental limitation and we'll have created introspection and self-learning. However, it's hard to predict whether this will allow them to make novel, intuitive leaps of discovery?

[0] It's an imperfect analogy, but we're expecting perfection from creations which are similarly handicapped as Leonard Shelby in the film Memento.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#124

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

iammjm wrote: post #114
paxys wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good luck ignoring your biology’s impulse to breathe

You think an LLM cannot switch itself off?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#125

Post by exe34 »

jpnc wrote: post #74
exe34 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But to say "you can never be a real woman, because you can't give birth" would be very silly, given how many "real women" can't. And yet that doesn't stop the terfs.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#126

Post by tjr »

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…

Without going to look up the exact quote, I remember an AI researcher years (decades) ago saying something to the effect of, Biologists look at living creatures and wonder how they can be alive; astronomers look at the cosmos and wonder what else is out there; those of us in artificial intelligence look at computer systems and wonder how they can be made to wonder such things.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#127

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

xienze wrote: post #121
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…

> "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?" Invent some novel concept, much the same way scientists and mathematicians of the distant past did? I doubt Newton's brain was simply churning out a stream of the "next statistically probable token" until -- boom! Calculus. There was clearly a higher order understanding of many abstract con…

> Newton's brain was simply churning out a stream of the "next statistically probable token"

At some level we know human thinking is just electrons and atoms flowing. It’s likely at a level between that and “Boom! Calculus”, the complexity is equivalent to streaming the next statistically probably token.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#128

Post by jackcviers3 »

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…

The last one is fairly simple to solve. Set up a microphone in any busy location where conversations are occurring. In an agentic loop, send random snippets of audio recordings for transcriptions to be converted to text. Randomly send that to an llm, appending to a conversational context. Then, also hook up a chat interface to discuss topics with the output from the llm. The random background noise and the context output in response serves as a confounding internal dialog to the conversation it is having with the user via the chat interface. It will affect the outputs in response to the user.

If it interrupts the user chain of thought with random questions about what it is hearing in the background, etc. If given tools for web search or generating an image, it might do unprompted things. Of course, this is a trick, but you could argue that any sensory input living sentient beings are also the same sort of trick, I think.

I think the conversation will derail pretty quickly, but it would be interesting to see how uncontrolled input had an impact on the chat.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#129

Post by throw4847285 »

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.

The fact that you try to elide the difference between nebulous and magical (perhaps subconsciously), is proof that you have no idea what you are talking about and project that on all your interlocutors. And your claim that people who are trying to argue that LLMs cannot think are all excluding a section of humanity just reveals your own disdain for said people. If you have a purely functionalist, egotistical view of the world, and people only matter in as much as what they can do for you, it's very easy to embrace LLMs without issue because you never really had a theory of mind in the first place.
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