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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#321

Post by inglor_cz »

esafak wrote: post #159
thomastjeffery wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most descriptive title I could give an LLM is "bias". An LLM is not "biased", it is bias ; or at the very least, it's a good imitation of the system of human thinking/perception that we call bias. An LLM is a noise generator. It generates tokens without logic, arithmetic, or any "reason" whatsoever. The noise that an LLM generates is not truly random. Instead, the LLM is biased to generate familiar noise.…

LLMs today are great coders. Most humans are worse.

LLMs ingested a lot of high-quality code during their training, plus LLMs being capable of programming is a huge commercial use case, so no wonder that they are good at coding.

My experience, though, is that they aren't good at defining the task to be coded, or thinking about some unexpected side-effects. Code that will be left for them to develop freely will likely become bloated quite fast.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#322

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

beeflet wrote: post #271
adamzwasserman wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why not? Consciousness is a state of self-awareness.

You know you're conscious, but you can't prove the consciousness of anybody around you, nor can you prove your own consciousness to others.

To an external observer, another human's brain and body is nothing more than a complex electrical/chemical circuit. They could easily be a P-Zombie [0], a human body with no consciousness inside, but the circuits are running and producing the appearance of consciousness via reactions to stimuli that mimic a conscious human.

Theoretically, with sufficient technology, you could take a snapshot of the state of someone's brain and use it to predict exactly how they would react to any given stimulus.

Just think about how medications can change the way people behave and the decisions they make. We're all just meat and free will is an illusion.

But getting back on topic...my instinct wants to say that a computer cannot become conscious, but it may merely produce an output that resembles consciousness. A computer is merely a rock that we've shaped to do math. I want to say you can't give consciousness to a rock, but then how did we become conscious? My understanding that life began as primordial soup that resulted in self-replicating molecules that formed protein chains, which over millions of years evolved into single-celled life, which then evolved into multi-celled life, and eventually the complex organisms we have today...how did consciousness happen?

Somehow, consciousness can arise from non-conscious matter. With that knowledge, I do not think it is impossible for a computer to gain consciousness.

But I don't think it'll happen from an LLM.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#323

Post by KoolKat23 »

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. Consciousness itself is probably just an illusion, a phenomena/name of something that occurs when you bunch thinking together. Think of this objectively and base it on what we know of the brain. It literally is working off of what hardware we have, there's no magic.

2. That's just a well adapted neural network (I suspect more brain is left than you let on). Multimodal model making the most of its limited compute and whatever gpio it has.

3. Humans navigate a pre-existing map that is already built. We can't understand things in other dimensions and need to abstract this. We're mediocre at computation.

I know there's people that like to think humans should always be special.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#324

Post by rustystump »

crazygringo wrote: post #268
rustystump wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of input it has in-fact seen somewhere in the corpus it was trained on. Certainly not one for one but easily an 98% match. This is the whole point of what the other person is trying to comment on i think. The reality is most of language is regurgitating 99% to communicate an internal state in a very compressed form. That 1% tho maybe is the magic that makes us human. We c…

> the overwhelming majority of input it has in-fact seen somewhere in the corpus it was trained on. But it thinks just great on stuff it wasn't trained on. I give it code I wrote that is not in its training data, using new concepts I've come up with in an academic paper I'm writing, and ask it to extend the code in a certain way in accordance with those concepts, and it does a great job. This isn't regurgitation. Eve…

I think you may think too highly of academic papers or more so that they oft still only have 1% in there.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#325

Post by estearum »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #323
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. Consciousness itself is probably just an illusion, a phenomena/name of something that occurs when you bunch thinking together. Think of this objectively and base it on what we know of the brain. It literally is working off of what hardware we have, there's no magic. 2. That's just a well adapted neural network (I suspect more brain is left than you let on). Multimodal model making the most of its limited compute a…

> Consciousness itself is probably just an illusion

This is a major cop-out. The very concept of "illusion" implies a consciousness (a thing that can be illuded).

I think you've maybe heard that sense of self is an illusion and you're mistakenly applying that to consciousness, which is quite literally the only thing in the universe we can be certain is not an illusion. The existence of one's own consciousness is the only thing they cannot possibly be illuded about (note: the contents of said consciousness are fully up for grabs)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#326

Post by beeflet »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #322
beeflet wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Consciousness is a state of self-awareness.

You know you're conscious, but you can't prove the consciousness of anybody around you, nor can you prove your own consciousness to others. To an external observer, another human's brain and body is nothing more than a complex electrical/chemical circuit. They could easily be a P-Zombie [0], a human body with no consciousness inside, but the circuits are running and producing the appearance of consciousness via react…

I do not think there is really such thing as a p-zombie. If you simulate feelings and act on them, that is the same thing as having feelings. Including feelings of self-awareness.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#327

Post by adamzwasserman »

andoando wrote: post #303
adamzwasserman wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spe…

>I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." Why would we not? We live in the same physical world and encounter the same problems.

You're actually proving Wittgenstein's point. We share the same physical world, but we don't encounter the same problems. A lion's concerns - territory, hunting, pride hierarchy - are fundamentally different from ours: mortgages, meaning, relationships.

And here's the kicker: you don't even fully understand me, and I'm human. What makes you think you'd understand a lion?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#328

Post by rustystump »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #266
rustystump wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of input it has in-fact seen somewhere in the corpus it was trained on. Certainly not one for one but easily an 98% match. This is the whole point of what the other person is trying to comment on i think. The reality is most of language is regurgitating 99% to communicate an internal state in a very compressed form. That 1% tho maybe is the magic that makes us human. We c…

Except it's more than capable of solving novel problems that aren't in the training set and aren't a close match to anything in the training set. I've done it multiple times across multiple domains. Creating complex Excel spreadsheet structures comes to mind, I just did that earlier today - and with plain GPT-5, not even -Thinking. Sure, maybe the Excel formulas themselves are a "98% match" to training data, but it t…

I think people confuse novel to them with novel to humanity. Most of our work is not so special

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#329

Post by KoolKat23 »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #259
eloisant wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In abstract we do the exact same thing

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#330

Post by j1mr10rd4n »

Geoffrey Hinton's recent lecture at the Royal Institute[1] is a fascinating watch. His assertion that human use of language being exactly analogous to neural networks with back-propagation really made me think about what LLMs might be able to do, and indeed, what happens in me when I "think". A common objection to LLM "intelligence" is that "they don't know anything". But in turn... what do biological intelligences "know"?

For example, I "know" how to do things like write constructs that make complex collections of programmable switches behave in certain ways, but what do I really "understand"?

I've been "taught" things about quantum mechanics, electrons, semiconductors, transistors, integrated circuits, instruction sets, symbolic logic, state machines, assembly, compilers, high-level-languages, code modules, editors and formatting. I've "learned" more along the way by trial and error. But have I in effect ended up with anything other than an internalised store of concepts and interconnections? (c.f. features and weights).

Richard Sutton takes a different view in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel[2] and asserts that "learning" must include goals and reward functions but his argument seemed less concrete and possibly just a semantic re-labelling.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdziSLYzHw [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg

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