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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#341

Post by KoolKat23 »

tomfly wrote: post #333
KoolKat23 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When are we as humans creative outside our training data? It's very rare we actually discover something truly novel. This is often random, us stumbling onto it, brute force or purely by being at the right place at the right time.

On the other hand, until it's proven it'd likely be considered a hallucination. You need to test something before you can dismiss it. (They did burn witches for discoveries back in the day, deemed witchcraft). We also reduce randomness and pre-train to avoid overfitting.

Day to day human creative outputs as humans are actually less exciting when you think about it further, we build on pre-existing knowledge. No different to good prompt output with the right input. Humans are just more knowledgeable & smarter at the moment.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#342

Post by raincole »

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…

I'd represent the same idea but in a different way:

I don't know what the exact definition of "thinking" is. But if a definition of thinking rejects the possibility of that current LLMs think, I'd consider that definition useless.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#343

Post by nearbuy »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #290
nearbuy wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any cases like that? I've never heard of someone functioning normally with little or no brain beyond a cerebellum.

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...

The first article is about someone missing a cerebellum, not part of their cerebrum. That's the motor and balance part of the brain, and as you might expect, the subject of the article has deficits in motor control and balance.

The Biology StackExchange answer just says that frontal lobotomies don't kill you. It doesn't say that lobotomized people function normally.

The other two articles are just misreporting on hydrocephalus. This is a condition where fluid build-up compresses the brain tissue, making it appear like a large part of the brain is missing in CT scans. The pressure from the fluid is actually compressing the brain. While it can damage the brain, there is no way to tell from the scans how much, if any, brain matter was destroyed. Hydrocephalus usually causes death or severe deficits, but occasionally it doesn't.

Even assuming though that it were all true and people could function normally with little or no brain, that doesn't really tell us anything about LLMs, but rather just uppends all of neuroscience. It would seem to imply the brain isn't doing the thinking and perhaps we have something else like an intangible soul.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#344

Post by roadside_picnic »

pegasus wrote: post #291
roadside_picnic wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking There is currently zero evidence to suggest that human thinking violates any of the basics principles of the theory of computation nor extend the existing limits of computability. > Which is not at all a boring question. It is because you aren't introducing any evidence to theoretically challenge what we've already know about computation for almost 100 years n…

> There is currently zero evidence... Way smarter people than both of us disagree: among them being Roger Penrose, who wrote two books on this very subject. See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804258 "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

Can you just point me to the concrete examples (the most compelling examples in the book would work) where we can see "thinking" that performs something that is currently considered to be beyond the limits of computation?

I never claimed no one speculates that's the case, I claimed there was no evidence. Just cite me a concrete example where the human mind is capable of computing something that violates the theory of computation.

> "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

Fully agree, but you are specifically discussing philosophical statements. And the fact that the only response you have is to continue to pile undefined terms and hand wave metaphysics doesn't do anything to further your point.

You believe that computing machines lack something magical that you can't describe that makes them different than humans. I can't object to your feelings about that, but there is literally nothing to discuss if you can't even define what those things are, hence this discussion is, as the original parent comment mention, is "extremely boring".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#345

Post by adamzwasserman »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #334
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.

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.

LLMs don't use 'overall probability' in any meaningful sense. During training, gradient descent creates highly concentrated 'gravity wells' of correlated token relationships - the probability distribution is extremely non-uniform, heavily weighted toward patterns seen in training data. The model isn't selecting from 'astronomically many possible sequences' with equal probability; it's navigating pre-carved channels in high-dimensional space. That's fundamentally different from novel discovery.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#346

Post by adamzwasserman »

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

Perhaps in practice as well. It is well-established that our interaction with language far exceeds what we are conscious of.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#347

Post by j1mr10rd4n »

adverbly wrote: post #22

So happy to see Hofstadter referenced! He's the GOAT in my opinion for "thinking about thinking". My own thinking on this is that AI actually IS thinking - but its like the MVB of thinking (minimum viable brain) I find thought experiments the best for this sort of thing: - Imagine you had long term memory loss so couldn't remember back very long You'd still be thinking right? - Next, imagine you go to sleep and lose…

You should definitely also read "Permutation City" by Greg Egan[1] if you haven't already! Amazing book...

[1]https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#348

Post by adamzwasserman »

tomfly wrote: post #333
KoolKat23 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The LLM doesn't 'know' more than us - it has compressed more patterns from text than any human could process. That's not the same as knowledge. And yes, the training algorithms deliberately skew the distribution to maintain coherent output - without that bias toward seen patterns, it would generate nonsense. That's precisely why it can't be creative outside its training distribution: the architecture is designed to prevent novel combinations that deviate too far from learned patterns. Coherence and genuine creativity are in tension here

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#349

Post by adamzwasserman »

nearbuy wrote: post #343
adamzwasserman wrote: post #290

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...

The first article is about someone missing a cerebellum, not part of their cerebrum. That's the motor and balance part of the brain, and as you might expect, the subject of the article has deficits in motor control and balance. The Biology StackExchange answer just says that frontal lobotomies don't kill you. It doesn't say that lobotomized people function normally. The other two articles are just misreporting on hyd…

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

#350

Post by beeflet »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #327
andoando wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Humans also have territory, hunting and hierarchy. Everything that a lion does, humans also do but more complicated. So I think we would be able to understand the new creature.

But the problem is really that the lion that speaks is not the same creature as the lion we know. Everything the lion we know wants to say can already be said through its body language or current faculties. The goldfish grows to the size of its container.

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