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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

newyorker.com

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#161

Post by ithkuil »

zahlman wrote: post #135
IanCal wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> but then humans don’t have zero input Humans don't require input to, say, decide to go for a walk. What's missing in the LLM is volition .

It's as if a LLM is only one part of a brain, not the whole thing.

So of course it doesn't do everything a human does, but it still can do some aspects of mental processes.

Whether "thinking" means "everything a human brain does" or whether "thinking" means a specific cognitive process that we humans do, is a matter of definition.

I'd argue that defining "thinking" independently of "volition" is a useful definition because it allows us to break down things in parts and understand them

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#162

Post by danielbln »

iammjm wrote: post #122
jstanley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Emotions tend to manifest as physical sensations, and if you don't think that's true it's likely you haven't been paying attention. See also https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/mapping-h...

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#163

Post by danielbln »

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…

My 5 year old won't be coming up with novel concepts around calculus either, yet she's clearly thinking, sentient and sapient. Not sure taking the best of the best of humanity as the goal standard is useful for that definition.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#164

Post by danielbln »

deadbabe wrote: post #91
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).

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

What is an idea?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#165

Post by myrmidon »

prmph wrote: post #138
myrmidon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered You would not need the simulation to be perfect; there is ample evidence that our brains a quite robust against disturbances. > just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If you don't want that to be true, you need some kind of magic, that makes the simulation behave differently from reality. How woul…

> "quite robust against disturbances." does not mean that the essential thing gives rise to consciousness is only approximate. To give an example from software, you can write software is robust against bad input, attempts to crash it, even bit flips. But, if I came in and just changed a single character in the source code, that may cause it to fail compilation, fail to run, or become quite buggy. > If you don't want…

How is it a false dichotomy? If you want consciousness to NOT be simulateable, then you need some essential component to our minds that can't be simulated (call it soul or whatever) and for that thing to interface with our physical bodies (obviously).

We have zero evidence for either.

> does not mean that the essential thing gives rise to consciousness is only approximate

But we have 8 billion different instances that are presumably conscious; plenty of them have all kinds of defects, and the whole architecture has been derived by a completely mechanical process free of any understanding (=> evolution/selection).

On the other hand, there is zero evidence of consciousness continuing/running before or after our physical brains are operational.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#166

Post by standardly »

I don't see a good argument being made for what headline claims. Much of the article reads like a general commentary on LLM's, not a case for AI "thinking", in the sense that we understand it.

It would take an absurdly broad definition of the word "think" to even begin to make this case. I'm surprised this is honestly up for debate.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#167

Post by amarant »

simonw wrote: post #118
amarant wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> solve simple maths problems, for example the kind found in the game 4=10 I'm pretty sure that's been solved for almost 12 months now - the current generation "reasoning" models are really good at those kinds of problems.

Huh, they really do solve that now!

Well, I'm not one to back-pedal whenever something unexpected reveals itself, so I guess I have no choice but to declare current generation LLM's to be sentient! That came a lot sooner than I had expected!

I'm not one for activism myself, but someone really ought to start fighting for human, or at least animal, rights for LLM's. Since they're intelligent non-human entities, it might be something for Greenpeace?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#168

Post by jstanley »

iammjm wrote: post #122
jstanley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you think animals don't have feelings?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#169

Post by prmph »

gf000 wrote: post #153
prmph wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly, I guess this starts to get into philosophical questions around identity real quick.

To me, two such whirlwinds are identical but not the same. They are the same only if they are guaranteed to have the same value for every conceivable property, forever, and even this condition may not be enough.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#170

Post by esafak »

prmph wrote: post #51

> An A.I smarter than a Nobel prize winner. I don't even know what this means. If we assembled the sum total of all published human knowledge on a storage medium and gave a computer the ability to search it extremely well in order to answer any question falling within its domain, there, you would have a Nobel Prize beating "A.I". But this is as "earth-shattering" (/s) as the idea that human knowledge can be stored ou…

Search is not intelligence, but synthesis is, and LLMs interpolate well. They don't invent new branches of mathematics and science yet.
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