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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#471

Post by Kichererbsen »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #465
tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

I don't get why you would say that. it's just auto-completing. It cannot reason. It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with. you can give it more context and more data,but you're just helping it complete better. it does not derive an original state machine or algorithm to solve problems for which there are no obvious solutions. it instead approxima…

Sure. But neither do you. So are you really thinking or are you just autocompleting?

When was the last time you sat down and solved an original problem for which you had no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with? When has that ever happened in human history? All the great invention-moment stories that come to mind seem to have exactly that going on in the background: Prior context being auto-completed in an Eureka! moment.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#472

Post by gf000 »

DanHulton wrote: post #389
gf000 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, unless you believe in some spiritual, non-physical aspect of consciousness, we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it, including a computer. We can even randomly generate Turing machines, as they are just data. Now imagine we are extremely lucky and happen to end up with a super-intelligent program…

> we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). > So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it You're going off the rails IMMEDIATELY in your logic. Sure, one Turing-complete computer language can have its logic "emulated" by another, fine. But human intelligence is not a computer language -- you're mixing up the terms "Turing complete" and "Turing test…

Game of life, PowerPoint, and a bunch of non-PL stuff are all Turing-complete. I don't mix up terms, I did use a slightly sloppy terminology but it is the correct concept - and my point is that we don't know of a computational model that can't be expressed by a Turing-machine, humans are a physical "machine", ergo we must also fall into that category.

Give my comment another read, but it was quite understandable from context. (Also, you may want to give a read to the Turing paper because being executable by a person as well was an important concept within)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#473

Post by lz400 »

WalterSear wrote: post #457
lz400 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”? it wouldn't work probably, brains constantly alter themselves by forming new connections. Learning is inseparable from our intelligence.

Our intelligence, yes. But that doesn't establish it as essential for thought.

I mean, _we_ probably can't think with our wetware on a read-only substrate. It doesn't establish it as essential, just that the only sure example in nature of thought doesn't work that way.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#474

Post by madaxe_again »

layer8 wrote: post #371
tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

Sometimes after a night’s sleep, we wake up with an insight on a topic or a solution to a problem we encountered the day before. Did we “think” in our sleep to come up with the insight or solution? For all we know, it’s an unconscious process. Would we call it “thinking”? The term “thinking” is rather ill-defined, too bound to how we perceive our own wakeful thinking. When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feelin…

Perhaps this is an artefact of instantiation - when you talk with an LLM, the responding instance is just that - it comes into being, inhales your entire chat history, and then continues like the last chap, finishes its response, and dies.

The continuity is currently an illusion.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#475

Post by IanCal »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #465
tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

I don't get why you would say that. it's just auto-completing. It cannot reason. It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with. you can give it more context and more data,but you're just helping it complete better. it does not derive an original state machine or algorithm to solve problems for which there are no obvious solutions. it instead approxima…

> it's just auto-completing. It cannot reason

Auto completion just means predicting the next thing in a sequence. This does not preclude reasoning.

> I don't get why you would say that.

Because I see them solve real debugging problems talking through the impact of code changes or lines all the time to find non-obvious errors with ordering and timing conditions on code they’ve never seen before.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#476

Post by madaxe_again »

creer wrote: post #416
layer8 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes after a night’s sleep, we wake up with an insight on a topic or a solution to a problem we encountered the day before. Did we “think” in our sleep to come up with the insight or solution? For all we know, it’s an unconscious process. Would we call it “thinking”? The term “thinking” is rather ill-defined, too bound to how we perceive our own wakeful thinking. When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feelin…

Interesting, you think the associations your brain comes up with during sleep are NOT thinking?

I’d say it’s more like annealing. Sort, filter, compress, integrate.

Updates your models for the next morning, which is why the answer is there when it wasn’t before.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#477

Post by brabel »

bithead wrote: post #406
layer8 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes after a night’s sleep, we wake up with an insight on a topic or a solution to a problem we encountered the day before. Did we “think” in our sleep to come up with the insight or solution? For all we know, it’s an unconscious process. Would we call it “thinking”? The term “thinking” is rather ill-defined, too bound to how we perceive our own wakeful thinking. When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feelin…

Do LLMs ever ask for you to clarify something you said in a way a person who doesn't quite understand what you said will do?

What now, two minutes using one and you are going to get that!

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#478

Post by procaryote »

ACCount37 wrote: post #260
procaryote wrote: post #200

In all these discussions there seems to be an inverse correlation between how well people understand what an LLM does and how much they believe it thinks. If you don't understand what an LLM does – that it is a machine generating a statistically probable token given a set of other tokens – you have a black box that often sounds smart, and it's pretty natural to equate that to thinking.

"Next token prediction" is not an answer. It's mental shortcut. An excuse not to think about the implications. An excuse a lot of people are eager to take . First, autoregressive next token prediction can be Turing complete . This alone should give you a big old pause before you say "can't do X". Second, "next token prediction" is what happens at an exposed top of an entire iceberg worth of incredibly poorly understo…

> First, autoregressive next token prediction can be Turing complete. This alone should give you a big old pause before you say "can't do X".

Lots of things are Turing complete. We don't usually think they're smart, unless it's the first time we see a computer and have no idea how it works

An LLM is a markov chain mathematically. We can build an LLM with a context window of one token and it's basically a token frequency table. We can make the context window bigger and it becomes better at generating plausible looking text.

Is it possible that beyond becoming better at generating plausible looking text – the expected and observed outcome – it also gains some actual intelligence? It's very hard to disprove, but occam's razor might not be kind to it.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#479

Post by procaryote »

almosthere wrote: post #365
procaryote wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, we also trained the LLM on (among other things) shakespeare, and adjusted the weights so that generating shakespeare would be more likely after that training. We don't claim a JPEG can paint great art, even though certain jpegs do.

So, more proof it's not thinking, right? It can only regurgitate a large if/else superstructure with some jumping around.

Who truly knows if you can make an if-else + randomness structure big enough to become smart?

But yes, we built a machine that generates text similar to what we built it from, and now we're looking at it generating text and are all impressed.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#480

Post by ako »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #465
tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

I don't get why you would say that. it's just auto-completing. It cannot reason. It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with. you can give it more context and more data,but you're just helping it complete better. it does not derive an original state machine or algorithm to solve problems for which there are no obvious solutions. it instead approxima…

An LLM by itself is not thinking, just remembering and autocompleting. But if you add a feedback loop where it can use tools, investigate external files or processes, and then autocomplete on the results, you get to see something that is (close to) thinking. I've seen claude code debug things by adding print statements in the source and reasoning on the output, and then determining next steps. This feedback loop is what sets AI tools apart, they can all use the same LLM, but the quality of the feedback loop makes the difference.
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