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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#191

Post by omnicognate »

danielbln wrote: post #163
xienze wrote: post #121

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?" 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.

"It's an unreasonably high standard to require of LLMs": LLMs are already vastly beyond your 5 year old, and you and me and any research mathematician, in knowledge. They have no greater difficulty talking about advanced maths than about Spot the Dog.

"It's a standard we don't require of other humans": I think qualitatively the same capabilities are used by all humans, all the time. The special thing about novel mathematical thinking is that it is verifiable, requires genuine insight and is a text generation task, not that you have to be able to do it to be considered intelligent.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#192

Post by DavidPiper »

npinsker wrote: post #146
handfuloflight wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.

That’s a great answer to GP’s question!

It's also nonsense. (Swimming and thinking are both human capabilities, not solutions to problems.)

But of course here we are back in the endless semantic debate about what "thinking" is, exactly to the GP's (and Edsger Dijkstra's) point.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#193

Post by triclops200 »

stavros wrote: post #179
triclops200 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

Of course, just doing my part in the collective free energy minimization ;)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#194

Post by yongjik »

handfuloflight wrote: post #120
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

What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.

Then the interesting question is whether computers can create more (better?) submarines, not whether they are thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#195

Post by oergiR »

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

There is more to this quote than you might think.

Grammatically, in English the verb "swim" requires an "animate subject", i.e. a living being, like a human or an animal. So the question of whether a submarine can swim is about grammar. In Russian (IIRC), submarines can swim just fine, because the verb does not have this animacy requirement. Crucially, the question is not about whether or how a submarine propels itself.

Likewise, in English at least, the verb "think" requires an animate object. the question whether a machine can think is about whether you consider it to be alive. Again, whether or how the machine generates its output is not material to the question.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#196

Post by gwd »

handfuloflight wrote: post #120
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

What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.

I think you missed the point of that quote. Birds fly, and airplanes fly; fish swim but submarines don't. It's an accident of language that we define "swim" in a way that excludes what submarines do. They move about under their own power under the water, so it's not very interesting to ask whether they "swim" or not.

Most people I've talked to who insist that LLMs aren't "thinking" turn out to have a similar perspective: "thinking" means you have to have semantics, semantics require meaning, meaning requires consciousness, consciousness is a property that only certain biological brains have. Some go further and claim that reason, which (in their definition) is something only human brains have, is also required for semantics. If that's how we define the word "think", then of course computers cannot be thinking, because you've defined the word "think" in a way that excludes them.

And, like Dijkstra, I find that discussion uninteresting. If you want to define "think" that way, fine, but then using that definition to insist LLMs can't do a thing because it can't "think" is like insisting that a submarine can't cross the ocean because it can't "swim".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#197

Post by famouswaffles »

almosthere wrote: post #73
famouswaffles wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot say, 'we know it's not thinking because we wrote the code' when the inference 'code' we wrote amounts to, 'Hey, just do whatever you figured out during training okay'. 'Power over your computer', all that is orthogonal to the point. A human brain without a functioning body would still be thinking.

Well, a model by itself with data that emits a bunch of human written words is literally no different than what JIRA does when it reads a database table and shits it out to a screen, except maybe a lot more GPU usage. I permit you, that yes, the data in the model is a LOT more cool, but some team could by hand, given billions of years (well probably at least 1 Octillion years), reproduce that model and save it to a d…

>Well, a model by itself with data that emits a bunch of human written words is literally no different than what JIRA does when it reads a database table and shits it out to a screen, except maybe a lot more GPU usage.

Obviously, it is different or else we would just use JIRA and a database to replace GPT. Models very obviously do NOT store training data in the weights in the way you are imagining.

>So basically if you have that stance you'd have to agree that when we FIRST invented computers, we created intelligence that is "thinking".

Thinking is by all appearances substrate independent. The moment we created computers, we created another substrate that could, in the future think.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#198

Post by teaearlgraycold »

snozolli wrote: post #183

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 autom…

I wish more people could feel this. Having used psychedelics a few times it’s illuminating to finally see the inside of your brain from a different perspective. I often wonder what would happen to the world if everyone had this experience. How many modern humans live their entire lives in the shallow mental states of survival, acceptance, or consumption? How would humanity’s course change if every adult got the gut punch of humility from seeing a slightly more objective reality?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#199

Post by pegasus »

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…

This, so much. Many mathematicians and physicists believe in intuition as a function separate from intelect. One is more akin to a form of (inner) perception, whereas the other is generative - extrapolation based on pattern matching and statistical thinking. That second function we have a handle on and getting better at it every year, but we don't even know how to define intuition properly. A fascinating book that discusses this phenomena is Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, a Western Perspective [1]

This quote from Grothendieck [2] (considered by many the greatest mathematician of the 20th century) points to a similar distinction: The mathematician who seeks to understand a difficult problem is like someone faced with a hard nut. There are two ways to go about it. The one way is to use a hammer — to smash the nut open by brute force. The other way is to soak it gently, patiently, for a long time, until it softens and opens of itself.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Loves-Hide-Quantum-Perspective...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#200

Post by procaryote »

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.

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