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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#401

Post by didibus »

I'd like to remind people not to cargo cult, and the main issue I see with any attempt at saying an LLM is thinking is that we just don't know how human thinking works.

We now understand pretty well how LLMs "think", and I don't know why we want to call it "thinking" when we mean we know how they work. But to say that their architecture and method of generating language amounts to human thinking? When we know very little of how human thinking works?

Like why are we even trying to make such claims? Is it all grift? Is it just because it helps people understand a little how they work in simplistic terms? Is it because it kind of describes the semblance of behavior you can expect from them?

LLMs do exhibit thinking like behavior, because they were trained to learn to do that, but I think we really need to check ourselves with claim of similarity in thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#402

Post by didibus »

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 guess it depends if you definite thinking thinking as chaining coherent reasoning sentences together 90-some% of the time.

But if you define thinking as the mechanism and process we mentally undergo and follow mentally... I don't think we have any clue if that's the same. Do we also just vector-map attention tokens and predict the next with a softmax? I doubt, and I don't think we have any proof that we do.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#403

Post by didibus »

raincole wrote: post #342
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.

Why would it be useless?

Generally thinking has been used to describe the process human follow in their brains when problem solving.

If the Palms do not follow that process, they are not thinking.

That doesn't mean they cannot solve problems using other mechanisms, they do, and we understand those mechanisms much better than we do human thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#404

Post by nprateem »

vidarh wrote: post #302
nprateem wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who believes an algorithm could be conscious needs to take mushrooms.

Unless you can show me you can exceed the Turing computable, there is no reason to consider you any more than an algorithm.

Take a big enough dose and the mushrooms will show you that.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#405

Post by stickfigure »

ivraatiems wrote: post #18

The author searches for a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans," but to me it seems almost trivially true that both are possible. What I mean by that is that I think there is a good chance that LLMs are similar to a subsystem of human thinking. They are great at pattern recognition and prediction, which is a huge part of cognition. What they are not is conscious, or…

> Turing Test

IMO none of the current crop of LLMs truly pass the Turing Test. If you limit the conversation to an hour or two, sure - but if you let a conversation run months or years I think it will be pretty easy to pick the machine. The lack of continuous learning and the quality dropoff as the context window fills up will be the giveaways.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#406

Post by bithead »

layer8 wrote: post #371
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…

Sometimes after a night’s sleep, we wake up with an insight on a topic or a solution to a problem we encountered the day before. Did we “think” in our sleep to come up with the insight or solution? For all we know, it’s an unconscious process. Would we call it “thinking”? The term “thinking” is rather ill-defined, too bound to how we perceive our own wakeful thinking. When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feelin…

Do LLMs ever ask for you to clarify something you said in a way a person who doesn't quite understand what you said will do?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#407

Post by satisfice »

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 think you are the one dismissing evidence. The valid chains of reasoning you speak of (assuming you are talking about text you see in a “thinking model” as it is preparing its answer) are narratives, not the actual reasoning that leads to the answer you get.

I don’t know what LLMs are doing, but only a little experimentation with getting it to describe its own process shows that it CAN’T describe its own process.

You can call what a TI calculator does “thinking” if you want. But what people are interested in is human-like thinking. We have no reason to believe that the “thinking” of LLMs is human-like.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#408

Post by bloppe »

mrob wrote: post #239
lbrandy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how you can assert what is necessary/sufficient for consciousness in this way. Your comment reads like you believe you understand consciousness far more than I believe anyone actually does.

I believe consciousness needs some kind of mutable internal state because otherwise literally everything is conscious, which makes the concept useless. A rock "computes" a path to fall when you drop it but I don't believe rocks are conscious. Panpsychism is not a common belief.

I think Nagel put it best in 1974: https://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-...

Essentially, something is conscious iff "there is something that it is like to be" that thing. Some people find that completely unsatisfying, some people think it's an insight of utter genius. I'm more in the latter camp.

Also, I think consciousness is non-binary. Something could be semi-conscious, or more or less conscious than something else.

Anyway, I don't think that there's anything that it's like to be an LLM. I don't see how anybody who knows how they actually work could think that.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#409

Post by bloppe »

mft_ wrote: post #123

Personal take: LLMs are probably part of the answer (to AGI?) but are hugely handicapped by their current architecture: the only time that long-term memories are formed is during training, and everything after that (once they're being interacted with) sits only in their context window, which is the equivalent of fungible, fallible, lossy short-term memory. [0] I suspect that many things they currently struggle with c…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#410

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

layer8 wrote: post #361
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #276

all this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically. To be clear, I don't believe that current AI t…

Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience (feeling something), and therefore the ability to suffer. It isn’t clear at all that the latter is a thing outside of the context of a biological brain’s biochemistry. It also isn’t clear at all that thinking or consciousness would somehow require that the condition of the automaton that performs these functions would need to be meaningful to…

>Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience...

Sure, but all the examples of conscious and/or thinking beings that we know of have, at the very least, the capacity to suffer. If one is disposed to take these claims of consciousness and thinking seriously, then it follows that AI research should, at minimum, be more closely regulated until further evidence can be discovered one way or the other. Because the price of being wrong is very, very high.

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