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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#181

Post by procaryote »

FloorEgg wrote: post #85
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 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…

> I think LLMs are conscious just in a very limited way. I think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence.

Why?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#182

Post by omnicognate »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #157
omnicognate wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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

That was an impressive result, but AIUI not an example of "coming up with and proving (preferably numerous) significant new theorems without human guidance".

For one thing, the output was an algorithm, not a theorem (except in the Curry-Howard sense). More importantly though, AlphaEvolve has to be given an objective function to evaluate the algorithms it generates, so it can't be considered to be working "without human guidance". It only uses LLMs for the mutation step, generating new candidate algorithms. Its outer loop is a an optimisation process capable only of evaluating candidates according to the objective function. It's not going to spontaneously decide to tackle the Langlands program.

Correct me if I'm wrong about any of the above. I'm not an expert on it, but that's my understanding of what was done.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#183

Post by snozolli »

During the pandemic, I experimented with vaping marijuana to see if I could improve my sleep quality. It worked to a degree, but after a few weeks of nightly use, I began to experience what I think is depersonalization.

I would be walking with friends and talking about our day, while simultaneously thinking, "this isn't actually me doing this, this is just a surface-level interaction being carried out almost by automation." Between that and the realization that I "hallucinate", i.e. misremember things, overestimate my understanding of things, and ruminate on past interactions or hypothetical ones, my feelings have changed regarding what intelligence and consciousness really mean.

I don't think people acknowledge how much of a "shell" we build up around ourselves, and how much time we spend in sort of a conditioned, low-consciousness state.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#184

Post by crazygringo »

Terr_ wrote: post #132
crazygringo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they do not actually think. I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process . You can see them pattern-match to determine a strategy to attack a problem, go through it piece-by-piece, revisit assumptions, reformulate strategy, and then consolidate findings to produce a final result. If that's not thinking, I literally don't know wha…

> I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process. Not true, you are falling for a very classic (prehistoric, even) human illusion known as experiencing a story : 1. There is a story-like document being extruded out of a machine humans explicitly designed for generating documents, and which humans trained on a bajillion stories humans alr…

You're claiming that the thinking is just a fictional story intended to look like it.

But this is false, because the thinking exhibits cause and effect and a lot of good reasoning. If you change the inputs, the thinking continues to be pretty good with the new inputs.

It's not a story, it's not fictional, it's producing genuinely reasonable conclusions around data it hasn't seen before. So how is it therefore not actual thinking?

And I have no idea what your short document example has to do with anything. It seems nonsensical and bears no resemblance to the actual, grounded chain of thought processes high-quality reasoning LLM's produce.

> OK, so that document technically has a "chain of thought" and "reasoning"... But whose?

What does it matter? If an LLM produces output, we say it's the LLM's. But I fail to see how that is significant?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#185

Post by FloorEgg »

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?

Karl Friston's free energy principle is probably roughly 80% of my reasons to think they're coupled. The rest comes from studying integrated information theories, architecture of brains and nervous systems and neutral nets, more broadly information theory, and a long tail of other scientific concepts (particle physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, emergence, etc...)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#186

Post by pegasus »

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

I disagree. 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 (I myself doubt this).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#187

Post by procaryote »

almosthere wrote: post #178
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 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 kno…

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.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#188

Post by TSUTiger »

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."

Was it Grok 4 Fast by chance?

I was dealing with something similar with it yesterday. No code involved. It was giving me factually incorrect information about a multiple schools and school districts. I told it it was wrong multiple times and it hallucinated school names even. Had the school district in the wrong county entirely. It kept telling me I was wrong and that although it sounded like the answer it gave me, it in fact was correct. Frustrated, I switched to Expert, had it re-verify all the facts, and then it spit out factually correct information.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#189

Post by zer00eyz »

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…

> That is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?

Training != Learning.

If a new physics breakthrough happens tomorrow, one that say lets us have FTL, how is an LLM going to acquire the knowledge, how does that differ from you.

The break through paper alone isnt going to be enough to over ride its foundational knowledge in a new training run. You would need enough source documents and a clear path deprecate the old ones...

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#190

Post by Balinares »

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…

Strive for independence.
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