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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#381

Post by tim333 »

djoldman wrote: post #103
kbelder wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you make the same claim about any other group of humans?

If you mean, "why can't we say that it's a complete waste of time to suppose that" humans are "thinking or intelligent," then yes, I think it is a complete waste of time! If there's no testable definition, there's no way to say the statement is true or false, nevermind what the implications may be. It is the same as saying we're all goblethorpy. It is an absurd question even in the abstract: "prove that you're thinki…

Hmm... I'll think about that.

(or maybe I can't as I don't have a testable definition that I think)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#382

Post by triyambakam »

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…

> 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.

People said the same thing about ELIZA

> Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question,

Then how do you define thinking if not a process that requires consciousness?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#383

Post by DoctorOetker »

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.

Consider your human brain, and the full physical state, all the protons and neutrons some housed together in the same nucleus, some separate, together with all the electrons. Physics assigns probabilities to future states. Suppose you were in the middle of a conversation and about to express a next syllable (or token). That choice will depend on other choices ("what should I add next"), and further choices ("what is the best choice of words to express the thing I chose to express next etc. The probabilities are in principle calculable given a sufficiently detailed state. You are correct that LLM's correspond to a probability distribution (given you immediately corrected to say that this table is implicit and parametrized by a geometric token relationships.). But so does every expressor of language, humans included.

The presence or absence of understanding can't be proven by mere association of with a "probability table", especially if such probability table is exactly expected from the perspective of physics, and if the models have continuously gained better and better performance by training them directly on human expressions!

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#384

Post by goatlover »

almosthere wrote: post #372
hackinthebochs wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad take. We didn't write the model, we wrote an algorithm that searches the space of models that conform to some high level constraints as specified by the stacked transformer architecture. But stacked transformers are a very general computational paradigm. The training aspect converges the parameters to a specific model that well reproduces the training data. But the computational circuits the model picks…

However there is another big problem, this would require a blob of data in a file to be labelled as "alive" even if it's on a disk in a garbage dump with no cpu or gpu anywhere near it. The inference software that would normally read from that file is also not alive, as it's literally very concise code that we wrote to traverse through that file. So if the disk isn't alive, the file on it isn't alive, the inference s…

A similar point was made by Jaron Lanier in his paper, "You can't argue with a Zombie".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#386

Post by goatlover »

vidarh wrote: post #332
embedding-shape wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bas…

We know that others do not experience the exact same sensations, because there are reported differences, some of which has been discussed on HN, such as aphantasia. The opposite would be visual thinkers. Then you have super tasters and smellers, people who have very refined palats, perhaps because their gustary and/or oilfactory senses are more heightened. Then you have savants like the musical genius who would hear three separate strands of music in his head at the same time.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#387

Post by goatlover »

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.

We haven't been able to decode what whales and dolphins are communicating. Are they using language? A problem SETI faces is whether we would be able to decode an alien signal. They may be too different in their biology, culture and technology. The book & movie Contact propose that math is a universal language. This assumes they're motivated to use the same basic mathematical structures we do. Maybe they don't care about prime numbers.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem explores an alien ocean that so different humans utterly fail to communicate with it, leading to the ocean creating humans from memories in brain scans broadcast over the ocean, but it's never understood why the ocean did this. The recreated humans don't know either.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#388

Post by tim333 »

omnicognate wrote: post #151
educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

> "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?" Independent frontier maths research, i.e. coming up with and proving (preferably numerous) significant new theorems without human guidance. I say that not because I think the task is special among human behaviours. I think the mental faculties that mathematicians use to do such research are…

That's quite a high bar for thinking like humans which rules out 99.99% of humans.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#389

Post by DanHulton »

gf000 wrote: post #50
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…

Well, unless you believe in some spiritual, non-physical aspect of consciousness, we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it, including a computer. We can even randomly generate Turing machines, as they are just data. Now imagine we are extremely lucky and happen to end up with a super-intelligent program…

> we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). > So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it

You're going off the rails IMMEDIATELY in your logic.

Sure, one Turing-complete computer language can have its logic "emulated" by another, fine. But human intelligence is not a computer language -- you're mixing up the terms "Turing complete" and "Turing test".

It's like mixing up the terms "Strawberry jam" and "traffic jam" and then going on to talk about how cars taste on toast. It's nonsensical.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#390

Post by tim333 »

deadbabe wrote: post #70
educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

Form ideas without the use of language. For example: imagining how you would organize a cluttered room.

Genie 3 is along the lines of ideas without language. It doesn't declutter though, I think. https://youtu.be/PDKhUknuQDg
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