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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#251

Post by yadaeno »

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 if we learned that brains reduce to the same basic mechanics?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#252

Post by exe34 »

throw4847285 wrote: post #129
exe34 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my favourite sport is watching people trying to exclude the possibility of AI thinking/becoming sentient/self-aware/whatever-nebulous-magical-term-you-like. Every single time they manage to exclude a whole section of humanity, because everything that AI "can never do", there are living, breathing people who can't do it either.

The fact that you try to elide the difference between nebulous and magical (perhaps subconsciously), is proof that you have no idea what you are talking about and project that on all your interlocutors. And your claim that people who are trying to argue that LLMs cannot think are all excluding a section of humanity just reveals your own disdain for said people. If you have a purely functionalist, egotistical view of…

I did not elide anything, thank you very much. I don't deny not knowing what intelligence is. I'm asserting that those, like you, who claim to know enough to ridicule the possibility of artificial minds, don't have a clue either.

I'm not the one excluding people from humanity. I'm pointing out that those who try to exclude the possibility of artificial minds keep excluding real people every time they try. Why are you projecting?

> people only matter in as much as what they can do for you,

Are you quite sure you're replying to the right person? It seems a bit off-topic.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#253

Post by [deleted] »

ffwd wrote: post #173
nrclark wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#254

Post by thechao »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #234
adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

> Conflates consciousness with "thinking" I don't see it. Got a quote that demonstrates this?

I'm not really onboard with the whole LLM's-are-conscious thing. OTOH, I am totally onboard with the whole "homo sapiens exterminated every other intelligent hominid and maybe — just maybe — we're not very nice to other intelligences". So, I try not to let my inborn genetic predisposition to exterminate other intelligence pseudo-hominids color my opinions too much.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#255

Post by adamzwasserman »

kenjackson wrote: post #244
adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

"vision had decades of head start, yet LLMs leapfrogged it in just a few years." From an evolutionary perspective though vision had millions of years head start over written language. Additionally, almost all animals have quite good vision mechanisms, but very few do any written communication. Behaviors that map to intelligence don't emerge concurrently. It may well be there are different forms of signals/sensors/mec…

From a terminology point of view, I absolutely agree. Human-likeness is what most people mean when they talk about AGI. Calling it what it is would clarify a lot of the discussions around it.

However I am clear that I do not believe that this will ever happen, and I see no evidence to convince that that there is even a possibility that it will.

I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#256

Post by adamzwasserman »

penteract wrote: post #250
adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

There's a whole paragraph in the article which says basically the same as your point 3 ( "glass bouncing, instead of shattering, and ropes defying physics" is literally a quote from the article). I don't see how you can claim the article missed it.

the article misses the significance of it.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#257

Post by adamzwasserman »

bjourne wrote: post #247
adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

> 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon There is NO WAY you can define "consciousness" in such a non-tautological, non-circular way that it includes all humans but excludes all LLMs.

You could have stopped here: "There is NO WAY you can define "consciousness"

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#258

Post by adamzwasserman »

nearbuy wrote: post #236
adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

Can you explain #2? What does the part of the brain that's primarily for balance and motor control tell us about deep learning?

My mistake thx. I meant "despite having no, or close to no, brain beyond a cerebellum"

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#259

Post by adamzwasserman »

eloisant wrote: post #227
adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

This is why I'm very skeptical about the "Nobel prize level" claims. To win a Nobel prize you would have to produce something completely new. LLM will probably be able to reach a Ph.D. level of understanding existing research, but bringing something new is a different matter.

LLMs do not understand anything.

They have a very complex multidimensional "probability table" (more correctly a compressed geometric representation of token relationships) that they use to string together tokens (which have no semantic meaning), which then get converted to words that have semantic meaning to US, but not to the machine.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#260

Post by ACCount37 »

procaryote wrote: post #200

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.

"Next token prediction" is not an answer. It's mental shortcut. An excuse not to think about the implications. An excuse a lot of people are eager to take.

First, autoregressive next token prediction can be Turing complete. This alone should give you a big old pause before you say "can't do X".

Second, "next token prediction" is what happens at an exposed top of an entire iceberg worth of incredibly poorly understood computation. An LLM is made not by humans, but by an inhuman optimization process. No one truly "understands" how an LLM actually works, but many delude themselves into thinking that they do.

And third, the task a base model LLM is trained for - what the optimization process was optimizing for? Text completion. Now, what is text? A product of human thinking expressed in natural language. And the LLM is forced to conform to the shape.

How close does it get in practice to the original?

Not close enough to a full copy, clearly. But close enough that even the flaws of human thinking are often reproduced faithfully.

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