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Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

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Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#251

Post by tim333 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #134
dang wrote: post #190

[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)

I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?” The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete syste…

“what does the number 7 taste like?” is a nonsense question.

"how much thinking time did the LLMs get when getting gold in the maths olympiad" is not a nonsense question. Four and a half hours apparently. Different thing.

You could go on to ask if saying humans thinking about the problem is thinking but LLMs thinking about the problem is not thinking and if so why? Maybe only synapses count?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#252

Post by CamperBob2 »

pegasus wrote: post #233
CamperBob2 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's post-training No, it is not. Read the paper. They are discussing an emergent property of the context itself: "For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model." I'm talking about tasks like multiplying two 4-digit numbers (let's say 8-digit, just to be safe, for reasoning models), which 5th o…

> No, it is not. Yes, it is. You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote. The critique I was pointing to is of the amount of examples and energy needed during model training, which is what the "learning" in "machine learning" actually refers to. The paper uses GPT-3 which had already absorbed all that data and electricity. And the "learning" the paper talks about is arguably not real learning, since none of the acqui…

Yes, it is. You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote. The critique I was pointing to is of the amount of examples and energy needed during model training, which is what the "learning" in "machine learning" actually refers to. The paper uses GPT-3 which had already absorbed all that data and electricity. And the "learning" the paper talks about is arguably not real learning, since none of the acquired skills persists beyond the end of the session.

Nobody is arguing about power consumption in this thread (but see below), and in any case the majority of power consumption is split between one-time training and the burden of running millions of prompts at once. Processing individual prompts costs almost nothing.

And it's already been stipulated that lack of long-term memory is a key difference between AI and human cognition. Give them some time, sheesh. This stuff's brand new.

This is easy to settle. Go check any frontier model and see how far they get with multiplying numbers with tool calling disabled.

Yes, it is very easy to settle. I ran this session locally in Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct-Q6_K: https://pastebin.com/G7Ewt5Tu

This is a 6-bit quantized version of a free model that is very far from frontier level. It traces its lineage through DeepSeek, which was likely RL-trained by GPT 4.something. So 2 out of 4 isn't bad at all, really. My GPU's power consumption went up by about 40 watts while running these queries, a bit more than a human brain.

If I ask the hardest of those questions on Gemini 3, it gets the right answer but definitely struggles: https://pastebin.com/MuVy9cNw

As for him, give the man a break, he's 94 years old and still sharp as a tack and intellectually productive.

(Shrug) As long as he chooses to contribute his views to public discourse, he's fair game for criticism. You don't have to invoke quantum woo to multiply numbers without specialized tools, as the tests above show. Consequently, I believe that a heavy burden of proof lies with anyone who invokes quantum woo to explain any other mental operations. It's a textbook violation of Occam's Razor.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#253

Post by hnfong »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #235
hnfong wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but doesn't your argument imply that the only "real" consciousness is mine? I'm not against this conclusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie ) but it doesn't seem to be compatible with what most people believe in general.

That's a fair reading but not what I was going for. I'm trying to argue for the irrelevance of causal scope when it comes to determining realness for consciousness. We are right to privilege non-virtual existence when it comes to things whose essential nature is to interact with our physical selves. But since no other consciousness directly physically interacts with ours, it being "real" (as in physically grounded in…

I don't think causal scope is what makes a virtual candle virtual.

If I make a button that lights the candle, and another button that puts it off, and I press those buttons, then the virtual candle is causally connected to our physical reality world.

But obviously the candle is still considered virtual.

Maybe a candle is not as illustrative, but let's say we're talking about a very realistic and immersive MMORPG. We directly do stuff in the game, and with the right VR hardware it might even feel real, but we call it a virtual reality anyway. Why? And if there's an AI NPC, we say that the NPC's body is virtual -- but when we talk about the AI's intelligence (which at this point is the only AI we know about -- simulated intelligence in computers) why do we not automatically think of this intelligence as virtual in the same way as a virtual candle or a virtual NPC's body?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#254

Post by hackinthebochs »

hnfong wrote: post #253
hackinthebochs wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair reading but not what I was going for. I'm trying to argue for the irrelevance of causal scope when it comes to determining realness for consciousness. We are right to privilege non-virtual existence when it comes to things whose essential nature is to interact with our physical selves. But since no other consciousness directly physically interacts with ours, it being "real" (as in physically grounded in…

I don't think causal scope is what makes a virtual candle virtual. If I make a button that lights the candle, and another button that puts it off, and I press those buttons, then the virtual candle is causally connected to our physical reality world. But obviously the candle is still considered virtual. Maybe a candle is not as illustrative, but let's say we're talking about a very realistic and immersive MMORPG. We…

Yes, causal scope isn't what makes it virtual. It's what makes us say it's not real. The real/virtual dichotomy is what I'm attacking. We treat virtual as the opposite of real, therefore a virtual consciousness is not real consciousness. But this inference is specious. We mistake the causal scope issue for the issue of realness. We say the virtual candle isn't real because it can't burn our hand. What I'm saying is that, actually the virtual candle can't burn our hand because of the disjoint causal scope. But the causal scope doesn't determine what is real, it just determines the space and limitations of potential causal interactions.

Real is about an object having all of the essential properties for that concept. If we take it as essential that candles can burn our hand, then the virtual candle isn't real. But it is not essential to consciousness that it is not virtual.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#255

Post by random9749832 »

gowld wrote: post #100
random9749832 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day most people would agree that if something is able to solve a problem without a lookup table / memorisation that it used reasoning to reach the answer. You are really just splitting hairs here.

What do "most" people thinking about LLMs, then? The "hair-splitting" underlies the whole GenAI debate.

We have widely used benchmarks for reasoning. And no no it does not, you need get off HN.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#256

Post by sillyfluke »

tim333 wrote: post #249
sillyfluke wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can arguably pass it now. Has everyone hastily agreed that it has been passed? Do people argue that a human can't figure out it's talking to an LLM if the user is aware that LLMs exist in the world and is aware of their limitations and that the chat log is able to extend to infinity ( "infinity" is a…

No, they haven't agreed because there was never a practical definition of the test. Turing had a game: >It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y,…

The definition seems to suffice if you give the interrogator as much time as they want and don't limit their world knowledge, which the definition that you cited doesn't seem to limit or constrain? By "world knowledge" I mean any knowledge that includes and is not limited to knowledge about how the machine works and its limitations. Therefore if the machine can't fool Alan Turing specifically then it fails even though it might have fooled some random Joe who's been living under a rock.

Hence since current LLMs are bound to hallucinate given enough time and seem not to able to maintain a conversation context window as robustly as humans, they would inevitably fail?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#257

Post by mcswell »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #184
frozenlettuce wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of my argument is that I notice that people project some "ethereal" properties over computations that happen in the... computer. Probably because electricity is involved, making things show up as "magic" from our point of view, making it easier to project consciousness or thinking onto the device. The cloud makes that even more abstract. But if you are aware that the transistors are just a medium that replic…

Your view is missing the forest for the trees. You see individual objects but miss the aggregate whole. You have a hard time conceiving of how exotic computers can be conscious because we are scale chauvinists by design. Our minds engage with the world on certain time and length scales, and so we naturally conceptualize our world based on entities that exist on those scales. But computing is necessarily scale indepen…

"'where is the consciousness' in such a system": One could ask the same of humans: where is the consciousness? The modern answer is (somewhere) in the brain, and I admit that's likely true. But we have no proof--no evidence, really--that our consciousness is not in some other dimension, and our brains could be receiving different kinds of signals from our souls in that other dimension, like TV sets receive audio and video signals from an old fashioned broadcast TV station.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#258

Post by grantcas »

hnfong wrote: post #230
hackinthebochs wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we don't think the candle in a simulated universe is a "real candle", why do we consider the intelligence in a simulated universe possibly "real intelligence"? I can smell a "real" candle, a "real" candle can burn my hand. The term real here is just picking out a conceptual schema where its objects can feature as relata of the same laws, like a causal compatibility class defined by a shared causal scope. But this…

Right, but doesn't your argument imply that the only "real" consciousness is mine? I'm not against this conclusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie ) but it doesn't seem to be compatible with what most people believe in general.

[dead]

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#259

Post by hackinthebochs »

mcswell wrote: post #257
hackinthebochs wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your view is missing the forest for the trees. You see individual objects but miss the aggregate whole. You have a hard time conceiving of how exotic computers can be conscious because we are scale chauvinists by design. Our minds engage with the world on certain time and length scales, and so we naturally conceptualize our world based on entities that exist on those scales. But computing is necessarily scale indepen…

"'where is the consciousness' in such a system": One could ask the same of humans: where is the consciousness? The modern answer is (somewhere) in the brain, and I admit that's likely true. But we have no proof--no evidence, really--that our consciousness is not in some other dimension, and our brains could be receiving different kinds of signals from our souls in that other dimension, like TV sets receive audio and…

This brain-receiver idea just isn't a very good theory. For one it increases the complexity of the model without any corresponding increase in explanatory power. The mystery of consciousness remains, except now you have all this extra mechanism involved.

Another issue is that the brain is overly complex for consciousness to just be received from elsewhere. Typically a radio is much less complex than the signal being received, or at least less complex than the potential space of signals it is possible to receive. We don't see that with consciousness. In fact, consciousness seems to be far less complex than the brain that supports it. The issue of the specificity of brain damage and the corresponding specificity in conscious deficits also points away from the receiver idea.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#260

Post by seanw265 »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #47

It's unfortunate that there's so little (none in the article, just 1 comment here as of this writing) mention of the Turing Test. The whole premise of the paper that introduced that was that "do machines think" is such a hard question to define that you have to frame the question differently. And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can argu…

I’d argue the goalposts have moved substantially over the past decade. The LLMs we casually use in ChatGPT today would have been described as AGI by many people 15, 10, maybe even 5 years ago.
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