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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#431

Post by dimator »

aydyn wrote: post #414
bongodongobob wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is my experience. For rote generation, it's great, saves me from typing out the same boilerplate unit test bootstrap, or refactoring something that exists, etc.

Any time I try to get a novel insight, it flails wildly, and nothing of value comes out. And yes, I am prompting incrementally and building up slowly.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#432

Post by zeroonetwothree »

theptip wrote: post #417
marcus_holmes wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Perhaps this is already known, but I would think there is a high chance that our brains require "write access" to function. That is, the very process of neural activity inherently makes modifications to the underlying structure.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#433

Post by electrograv »

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…

> So if the disk isn't alive, the file on it isn't alive, the inference software is not alive - then what are you saying is alive and thinking?

“So if the severed head isn’t alive, the disembodied heart isn’t alive, the jar of blood we drained out isn’t alive - then what are you saying is alive and thinking?”

- Some silicon alien life forms somewhere debating whether the human life form they just disassembled could ever be alive and thinking

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#434

Post by lz400 »

theptip wrote: post #417
marcus_holmes wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

it wouldn't work probably, brains constantly alter themselves by forming new connections. Learning is inseparable from our intelligence.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#435

Post by hattmall »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #420
bongodongobob wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, please this is literally what I want to see. I have yet to see an example where an LLM did anything that was sufficiently difficult. Not saying they can't be useful, but for anything past the basics they are really all over the place. And if we were paying anywhere near the true costs it wouldn't be even worth trying.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#436

Post by rifty »

I think the medium where information transformation happened was for many the only artificial line between what they called processing and what they called thinking. The caveat for others being that thinking is what you do with active awareness, and intuition is what you do otherwise.

That caveat to me is the useful distinction still to ponder.

My point of contention with equivalences to Human thinking still at this point is that AI seems to know more about the world with specificity than any human ever will. Yet it still fails sometimes to be consistent and continuous at thinking from that world where a human wouldn't. Maybe i'm off for this but that feels odd to me if the thinking is truly equivalent.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#437

Post by zeroonetwothree »

crazygringo wrote: post #268
rustystump wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of input it has in-fact seen somewhere in the corpus it was trained on. Certainly not one for one but easily an 98% match. This is the whole point of what the other person is trying to comment on i think. The reality is most of language is regurgitating 99% to communicate an internal state in a very compressed form. That 1% tho maybe is the magic that makes us human. We c…

> 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 it would be hard to prove that it's truly so novel that nothing similar is present in the training data. I've certainly seen in research that it's quite easy to miss related work even with extensive searching.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#438

Post by zeroonetwothree »

baq wrote: post #139
crazygringo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they do not actually think. I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process . You can see them pattern-match to determine a strategy to attack a problem, go through it piece-by-piece, revisit assumptions, reformulate strategy, and then consolidate findings to produce a final result. If that's not thinking, I literally don't know wha…

Brains are pretrained models, change my mind. (Not LLMs obviously, to be perfectly clear)

If you are right, then I certainly cannot change your mind.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#439

Post by hattmall »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #427
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. If one could write a quadrillion-line python script of nothing but if/elif/else statements nested 1 million blocks deep that seemingly parsed your questions and produced seemingly coherent, sensible, valid "chains…

I write software that is far less complex and I consider it to be "thinking" while it is working through multiple possible permutations of output and selecting the best one. Unless you rigidly define thinking, processing, computing, it's reasonable to use them interchangeably.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#440

Post by zeroonetwothree »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #359
beeflet wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it…

You've completely missed Wittgenstein's point. It's not about whether lions and humans share some behaviors - it's about whether they share the form of life that grounds linguistic meaning.

I think humans would be intelligent enough to understand the lion's linguistic meaning (after some training). Probably not the other way around. But it's a speculative argument, there's no real evidence one way or another.
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