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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#151

Post by omnicognate »

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?"

Independent frontier maths research, i.e. coming up with and proving (preferably numerous) significant new theorems without human guidance.

I say that not because I think the task is special among human behaviours. I think the mental faculties that mathematicians use to do such research are qualitatively the same ones all humans use in a wide range of behaviours that AI struggles to emulate.

I say it because it's both achievable (in principle, if LLMs can indeed think like humans) and verifiable. Achievable because it can be viewed as a pure text generation task and verifiable because we have well-established, robust ways of establishing the veracity, novelty and significance of mathematical claims.

It needs to be frontier research maths because that requires genuinely novel insights. I don't consider tasks like IMO questions a substitute as they involve extremely well trodden areas of maths so the possibility of an answer being reachable without new insight (by interpolating/recombining from vast training data) can't be excluded.

If this happens I will change my view on whether LLMs think like humans. Currently I don't think they do.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#152

Post by triclops200 »

paxys wrote: post #110
awestroke wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a researcher in these fields: this reasoning is tired, overblown, and just wrong. We have a lot of understanding of how the brain works overall. You don't. Go read the active inference book by Friston et. al. for some of the epistemological and behavioral mechanics (Yes, this applies to llms as well, they easily satisfy the requirements to be considered the mathematical object described as a markov blanket).

And, yes, if you could somehow freeze a human's current physical configuration at some time, you would absolutely, in principle, given what we know about the universe, be able to concretely map input to into actions. You cannot separate a human's representative configuration from their environment in this way, so, behavior appears much more non-deterministic.

Another paper by Friston et al (Path Integrals, particular kinds, and strange things) describes systems much like modern modeling and absolutely falls under the same action minimization requirements for the math to work given the kinds of data acquisition, loss functions, and training/post-training we're doing as a research society with these models.

I also recommend https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04035, but, in short, transformer models have functions and emergent structures provably similar both empirically and mathematically to how we abstract and consider things. Along with https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.10077, these 4 sources, alone, together strongly rebuke any idea that they are somehow not capable of learning to act like and think like us, though there's many more.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#153

Post by gf000 »

prmph wrote: post #143
gf000 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not talking about "identical" consciousnesses. I mean the same consciousness. The same consciousness cannot split into two, can it? Either it is (and continues to be) the same consciousness, or it is not. If it were the same consciousness, then you would have a person who exists in two places at once.

Consciousness has no agreed upon definition to begin with, but I like to think of it as to what a whirlwind is to a bunch of air molecules (that is, an example of emergent behavior)

So your question is, are two whirlwinds with identical properties (same speed, same direction, shape etc) the same in one box of air, vs another identical box?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#154

Post by energy123 »

esafak wrote: post #147
Symmetry wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it is, though, because it challenges our belief that only biological entities can think, and thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.

The point is that both are debates about definitions of words so it's extremely boring.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#155

Post by throwawayq3423 »

energy123 wrote: post #154
esafak wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is, though, because it challenges our belief that only biological entities can think, and thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.

The point is that both are debates about definitions of words so it's extremely boring.

except for the implications of one word over another are world-changing

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#156

Post by embedding-shape »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #119
embedding-shape wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

But language is the input and the vector space within which their knowledge is encoded and stored. The don't have a concept of a duck beyond what others have described the duck as. Humans got by for millions of years with our current biological hardware before we developed language. Your brain stores a model of your experience , not just the words other experiencers have shared with yiu.

> But language is the input and the vector space within which their knowledge is encoded and stored. The don't have a concept of a duck beyond what others have described the duck as.

I guess if we limit ourselves to "one-modal LLMs" yes, but nowadays we have multimodal ones, who could think of a duck in the way of language, visuals or even audio.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#157

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

omnicognate wrote: post #151
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?" Independent frontier maths research, i.e. coming up with and proving (preferably numerous) significant new theorems without human guidance. I say that not because I think the task is special among human behaviours. I think the mental faculties that mathematicians use to do such research are…

Google's AlphaEvolve independently discovered a novel matrix multiplication algorithm which beats SOTA on at least one axis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGCmu7YKgPA

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#158

Post by mrdarkies »

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…

[dead]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#159

Post by esafak »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #65
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…

I think the most descriptive title I could give an LLM is "bias". An LLM is not "biased", it is bias ; or at the very least, it's a good imitation of the system of human thinking/perception that we call bias. An LLM is a noise generator. It generates tokens without logic, arithmetic, or any "reason" whatsoever. The noise that an LLM generates is not truly random. Instead, the LLM is biased to generate familiar noise.…

LLMs today are great coders. Most humans are worse.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#160

Post by viccis »

Symmetry wrote: post #71
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

He was famously (and, I'm realizing more and more, correctly) averse to anthropomorphizing computing concepts.
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