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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#411

Post by bongodongobob »

geon wrote: post #377
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 incoherent, nonsensical and invalid chains of reasoning... LLMs are little more than RNGs. They are the tea leaves and you read whatever you want into them.

Ridiculous. I use it daily and get meaningful, quality results. Learn to use the tools.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#412

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

senordevnyc wrote: post #393
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…

As I recall a team at Anthropic is exploring this very question, and was soundly mocked here on HN for it.

what the technocratic mindprison does to a MF.

If anthropic sincerely believes in the possibility, then they are morally obligated to follow up on it.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#413

Post by marcus_holmes »

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…

Yes, I've seen the same things.

But; they don't learn. You can add stuff to their context, but they never get better at doing things, don't really understand feedback. An LLM given a task a thousand times will produce similar results a thousand times; it won't get better at it, or even quicker at it.

And you can't ask them to explain their thinking. If they are thinking, and I agree they might, they don't have any awareness of that process (like we do).

I think if we crack both of those then we'd be a lot closer to something I can recognise as actually thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#414

Post by aydyn »

bongodongobob wrote: post #411
geon wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having seen LLMs so many times produce incoherent, nonsensical and invalid chains of reasoning... LLMs are little more than RNGs. They are the tea leaves and you read whatever you want into them.

Ridiculous. I use it daily and get meaningful, quality results. Learn to use the tools.

Learn to work on interesting problems? If the problem you are working on is novel and hard, the AI will stumble.

Generalizing your experience to everyone else's betrays a lack of imagination.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#415

Post by willmarch »

bithead wrote: post #406
layer8 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, often

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#416

Post by creer »

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…

Interesting, you think the associations your brain comes up with during sleep are NOT thinking?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#417

Post by theptip »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #413
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…

Yes, I've seen the same things. But; they don't learn. You can add stuff to their context, but they never get better at doing things, don't really understand feedback. An LLM given a task a thousand times will produce similar results a thousand times; it won't get better at it, or even quicker at it. And you can't ask them to explain their thinking. If they are thinking, and I agree they might, they don't have any aw…

> But; they don't learn

If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?

Do amnesiacs who are incapable of laying down long-term memories not think?

I personally believe that memory formation and learning are one of the biggest cruces for general intelligence, but I can easily imagine thinking occurring without memory. (Yes, this is potentially ethically very worrying.)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#418

Post by jatora »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #413
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…

Yes, I've seen the same things. But; they don't learn. You can add stuff to their context, but they never get better at doing things, don't really understand feedback. An LLM given a task a thousand times will produce similar results a thousand times; it won't get better at it, or even quicker at it. And you can't ask them to explain their thinking. If they are thinking, and I agree they might, they don't have any aw…

This is just wrong though. They absolutely learn in-context in a single conversation within context limits. And they absolutely can explain their thinking; companies just block them from doing it.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#419

Post by mlsu »

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…

They remind me of the apparitions in Solaris. They have this like mechanical, almost player-piano like quality to them. They both connect with and echo us at the same time. It seems crazy to me and very intellectually uncreative to not think of this as intelligence.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#420

Post by bopbopbop7 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #411
geon wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having seen LLMs so many times produce incoherent, nonsensical and invalid chains of reasoning... LLMs are little more than RNGs. They are the tea leaves and you read whatever you want into them.

Ridiculous. I use it daily and get meaningful, quality results. Learn to use the tools.

They are only meaningful and quality if you don’t know what you’re doing. But please do show some of this meaningful and quality work so I can be proven wrong.
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