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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#171

Post by logifail »

BeetleB wrote: post #140
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…

> Disagree and push back The other day an LLM gave me a script that had undeclared identifiers (it hallucinated a constant from an import). When I informed it, it said "You must have copy/pasted incorrectly." When I pushed back, it said "Now you trust me: The script is perfectly correct. You should look into whether there is a problem with the installation/config on your computer."

There was a time when we'd have said you were talking to a sociopath.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#172

Post by roadside_picnic »

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.

> our belief that only biological entities can think

Whose belief is that?

As a computer scientist my perspective of all of this is as different methods of computing and we have a pretty solid foundations on computability (though, it does seem a bit frightening how many present-day devs have no background in the foundation of the Theory of Computation). There's a pretty common naive belief that somehow "thinking" is something more or distinct from computing, but in actuality there are very few coherent arguments to that case.

If, for you, thinking is distinct from computing then you need to be more specific about what thinking means. It's quite possible that "only biological entities can think" because you are quietly making a tautological statement by simply defining "thinking" as "the biological process of computation".

> thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.

What does this mean? I'm pretty sure for most fish swimming is pretty core to its existence. You seem to be assuming a lot of metaphysically properties of what you consider "thinking" such that it seems nearly impossible to determine whether or not anything "thinks" at all.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#173

Post by ffwd »

nrclark wrote: post #136
ffwd wrote: post #105

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…

one possible counter-argument: can you say for sure how your brain is creating those replacement words? When you replace tree with rainbow, does rainbow come to mind because of an unconscious neural mapping between both words and "forest"? It's entirely possible that our brains are complex pattern matchers, not all that different than an LLM.

That's a good point and I agree. I'm not a neuroscientist but from what I understand the brain has an associative memory so most likely those patterns we create are associatively connected in the brain.

But I think there is a difference between having an associative memory, and having the capacity to _traverse_ that memory in working memory (conscious thinking). While any particular short sequence of thoughts will be associated in memory, we can still overcome that somewhat by thinking for a long time. I can for example iterate on the sequence in my initial post and make it novel by writing down more and more disparate concepts and deleting the concepts that are closely associated. This will in the end create a more novel sequence that is not associated in my brain I think.

I also think there is the trouble of generating and detecting novel patterns. We know for example that it's not just low probability patterns. There are billions of unique low probability sequences of patterns that have no inherent meaning, so uniqueness itself is not enough to detect them. So how does the brain decide that something is interesting? I do not know.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#175

Post by logifail »

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.

> Yet we can ignore our biology, or act in ways that are the opposite of what our biology tells us.

I have Coeliac disease, in that specific case I'd really love to be able to ignore what "my biology" tells my body to do. I'd go eat all the things I know wouldn't be good for me to eat.

Yet I fear "my biology" has the upper hand :/

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#176

Post by 0x20cowboy »

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…

See https://arcprize.org/

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#177

Post by XorNot »

wry_discontent wrote: post #111
FloorEgg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLMs are conscious just in a very limited way. I think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence. If I had to guess, the current leading LLMs consciousness is most comparable to a small fish, with a conscious lifespan of a few seconds to a few minutes. Instead of perceiving water, nutrient gradients, light, heat, etc. it's perceiving tokens. It's conscious, but it's consciousness is so foreign to us it…

What makes you think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence?

It's hardly an unreasonable supposition: the one definitely conscious entities we know of are also the apex intelligence of the planet.

To put it another way: lots of things are conscious, but humans are definitely the most conscious beings on Earth.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#178

Post by almosthere »

gf000 wrote: post #50
almosthere wrote: post #9

Well, I think because we know how the code is written, in the sense that humans quite literally wrote the code for it - it's definitely not thinking, and it is literally doing what we asked, based on the data we gave it. It is specifically executing code we thought of. The output of course, we had no flying idea it would work this well. But it is not sentient. It has no idea of a self or anything like that. If it mak…

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 used to say "if you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespear" and no one would ever say that anymore, because now we can literally write shakespear with an LLM.

And the monkey strategy has been 100% dismissed as shit..

We know how to deploy monkeys on typewriters, but we don't know what they'll type.

We know how to deploy transformers to train and inference a model, but we don't know what they'll type.

We DON'T know how a thinking human (or animal) brain works..

Do you see the difference.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#179

Post by stavros »

triclops200 wrote: post #152
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.

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,…

Thanks for injecting some actual knowledge in one of these threads. It's really tiring to hear these non-sequitur "oh they can't think because " arguments every single thread, instead of saying "we just don't know enough" (where "we" is probably not "humans", but "the people in the thread").

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#180

Post by pegasus »

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.

They can be made boring by reducing them to an arbitrary choice of definition of the word "thinking", but the question is really about weather inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking, and so would deserve to be applied the same label. Which is not at all a boring question. It's equivalent to asking weather current architectures are enough to reach AGI.
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