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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

newyorker.com

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#441

Post by zeroonetwothree »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #397
goatlover wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

The whole "math is a universal" language is particularly laughable to me considering it is a formal system and the universe is observably irregular. As I am wont to say: regularity is only ever achieved at the price of generality.

Many mathematical structures are 'irregular'. That's not a very strong argument against math as a universal descriptor.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#442

Post by simulator5g »

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 photocopiers so many times produce coherent, sensible, and valid chains of words on a page, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#444

Post by zeroonetwothree »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #323
adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

1. Consciousness itself is probably just an illusion, a phenomena/name of something that occurs when you bunch thinking together. Think of this objectively and base it on what we know of the brain. It literally is working off of what hardware we have, there's no magic. 2. That's just a well adapted neural network (I suspect more brain is left than you let on). Multimodal model making the most of its limited compute a…

Consciousness is an emergent behavior of a model that needs to incorporate its own existence into its predictions (and perhaps to some extent the complex behavior of same-species actors). So whether or not that is an 'illusion' really depends on what you mean by that.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#445

Post by kbrkbr »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #422
mentos wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have examples of non sentience everywhere already with animals. And then an example of sentience with humans. So if you diff our brains the difference lies within a module in our prefrontal cortex. It’s a black box of logic but I can ‘understand’ or be willing to accept that it’s owed to ‘just’ more grey matter adding the self awareness to the rest of the system. But to me the big mystery is how animals have sensa…

I'd like to see a vote here, what percentage of HN readers believe animals have sentience or no sentience? Clearly most animals are less educated, and most are less intelligent, but non-sentient? That sounds like 200-year old claims that "when one steps on the tail of a cat, it does indeed protest loudly, but not because it feels anything or because it would be sentient, no, no, it protests merely due to selective pr…

I'm with you on this.

But asked for reasons I can only point to the social nature of their societies, where love and anger make sense, or of their hurt-behavior.

I also find it very hard to believe that everything else is slow evolution of components, and here all of a sudden something super complex comes into being out of nowhere.

But I still have no idea how it could work. What are the components and their interplay?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#446

Post by helloplanets »

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…

10^15 lines of code is a lot. We would pretty quickly enter the realm of it not having much to do with programming and more about just treating the LOC count as an amount of memory allocated to do X.

How much resemblance does the information in the conditionals need to have with the actual input, or can they immediately be transformed to a completely separate 'language' which simply uses the string object as its conduit? Can the 10^15 lines of code be generated with an external algorithm, or is it assumed that I'd written it by hand given an infinitely long lifespan?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#447

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #322
beeflet wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Consciousness is a state of self-awareness.

You know you're conscious, but you can't prove the consciousness of anybody around you, nor can you prove your own consciousness to others. To an external observer, another human's brain and body is nothing more than a complex electrical/chemical circuit. They could easily be a P-Zombie [0], a human body with no consciousness inside, but the circuits are running and producing the appearance of consciousness via react…

I think p-zombine is inherently self-contradictory. It's impossible to have _exactly_ the same behavior as someone truly conscious without actually being conscious.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#448

Post by zeroonetwothree »

selcuka wrote: post #320
beeflet wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

consciousness is the feeling of self awareness. I suppose you could prove it as much as any other feeling, by observing the way that people behave

> I suppose you could prove it as much as any other feeling, by observing the way that people behave Look up the term "philosophical zombie". In a nutshell, you can simulate a conscious being using a non-conscious (zombie) being. It is possible to simulate it so well that an outside observer can't tell the difference. If this is true, then the corollary is that you can't really know if other people are conscious. You…

I don't think you are using the phrase "it is possible" correctly. There's certainly no evidence that a philosophical zombie is "possible". I think there are strong arguments that it's not possible.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#449

Post by zeroonetwothree »

yalogin wrote: post #264

I don't see how we make the jump from current LLMs to AGI. May be it's my limited understanding of the research but current LLMs seem to not have any properties that indicate AGI. Would love to get thoughts from someone that understands it

I agree, I think two things are missing from current AI:

1. A model of the world itself (or whatever domain is under discussion). 2. A way to quickly learn and update in response to feedback.

These are probably related to an extent.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#450

Post by zeroonetwothree »

j1mr10rd4n wrote: post #330

Geoffrey Hinton's recent lecture at the Royal Institute[1] is a fascinating watch. His assertion that human use of language being exactly analogous to neural networks with back-propagation really made me think about what LLMs might be able to do, and indeed, what happens in me when I "think". A common objection to LLM "intelligence" is that "they don't know anything". But in turn... what do biological intelligences "…

The vast majority of human learning is in constructing a useful model of the external world. This allows you to predict extremely accurate the results of your own actions. To that end, every single human knows a huge amount.
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