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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#331

Post by tomfly »

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.

Exactly. It’s been stated for a long time, before llms. For instance this paper https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/searle.mind... Describes a translator who doesn’t know the language.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#332

Post by vidarh »

embedding-shape wrote: post #83
vidarh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no way of measuring whether or not you experience feelings and sensations, or are just regurgitating statements to convince me of that. The only basis I have for assuming you are sentient according to that definition is trust in your self-reports.

I'm fairly sure we can measure human "sensation" as in detect physiological activity in the body in someone who is under anesthesia yet the body reacts in different ways to touch or pain. The "feelings" part is probably harder though.

We can measure the physiological activity, but not whether it gives rise to the same sensations that we experience ourselves. We can reasonably project and guess that they are the same, but we can not know.

In practical terms it does not matter - it is reasonable for us to act as if others do experience the same we do. But if we are to talk about the nature of conscience and sentience it does matter that the only basis we have for knowing about other sentient beings is their self-reported experience.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#333

Post by tomfly »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #329
adamzwasserman wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s hard to believe this when the llm “knows” so much more then us yet still can not be creative outside its training distribution

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#334

Post by KoolKat23 »

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.

Given a random prompt, the overall probability of seeing a specific output string is almost zero, since there are astronomically many possible token sequences.

The same goes for humans. Most awards are built on novel research built on pre-existing works. This a LLM is capable of doing.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#335

Post by kakapo5672 »

almosthere wrote: post #9

Well, I think because we know how the code is written, in the sense that humans quite literally wrote the code for it - it's definitely not thinking, and it is literally doing what we asked, based on the data we gave it. It is specifically executing code we thought of. The output of course, we had no flying idea it would work this well. But it is not sentient. It has no idea of a self or anything like that. If it mak…

It's not accurate to say we "wrote the code for it". AI isn't built like normal software. Nowhere inside an AI will you find lines of code that say If X Then Y, and so on.

Rather, these models are literally grown during the training phase. And all the intelligence emerges from that growth. That's what makes them a black box and extremely difficult to penetrate. No one can say exactly how they work inside for a given problem.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#336

Post by adamzwasserman »

jdadj wrote: post #312
adamzwasserman wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/16/392789753/a... https://irishtimes.com/news/remarkable-story-of-maths-genius... https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/64017/what-secti... https://cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edit...

"We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum" -- I take this to mean that these are humans that have a cerebellum but not much else. Your npr.org link talks about the opposite -- regular brain, but no cerebellum. Your irishtimes.com link talks about cerebrum, which is not the same as cerebellum. Your biology.stackexchange.com link talks about Cerebral Cortex, wh…

You're right - I mixed up cerebellum/cerebrum/cortex terminology. My bad. The cases I'm referencing are hydrocephalus patients with severely compressed cerebral tissue who maintained normal cognitive function. The point about structural variation not precluding consciousness stands."

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#337

Post by adamzwasserman »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #310
adamzwasserman wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/16/392789753/a... https://irishtimes.com/news/remarkable-story-of-maths-genius... https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/64017/what-secti... https://cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edit...

Your first example is someone without a cerebellum which is not like the others. The other examples are people with compressed neural tissue but that is not the same as never having the tissue. A being with only a cerebellum could not behave like a human.

You're right - I mixed up cerebellum/cerebrum/cortex terminology. My bad. The cases I'm referencing are hydrocephalus patients with severely compressed cerebral tissue who maintained normal cognitive function. The point about structural variation not precluding consciousness stands.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#338

Post by deadbabe »

yadaeno wrote: post #251
deadbabe wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Impossible.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#339

Post by crazygringo »

rustystump wrote: post #324
crazygringo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think you're missing the point. This is my own paper and these are my own new concepts. It doesn't matter if the definition of the new concepts are only 1% of the paper, the point is they are the concepts I'm asking the LLM to use, and are not in its training data.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#340

Post by ath3nd »

tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

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