No way does the evolutionary nature of the human brain suggest it's optimally designed for reasoning or thinking, so it's not a great model of how AGI might be engineered. A model. Not the model. We don't think clearly about ourselves, which may be the greatest danger / obstacle ahead?
The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
481–490 of 1001 posts
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#482Having 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…
Different PoV: You have a local bug and ask the digital hive mind for a solution, but someone already solved the issue and their solution was incorporated... LLMs are just very effficient at compressing billions of solutions into a few GB. Try to ask something no one ever came up with a solution so far.
This argument comes up often but can be easily dismissed. Make up a language and explain it to the LLM like you would to a person. Tell it to only use that language now to communicate. Even earlier AI was really good at this. You will probably move the goal posts and say that this is just pattern recognition, but it still fits nicely within your request for something that no one ever came up with.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think LLMs are conscious just in a very limited way. I think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence. Why?
I already answered under the other comment asking me why and if your curious I suggest looking for it. Very short answer is Karl Friston's free energy pricniple
LLMs work nothing like Karl Friston's free energy principle though
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#484This is merely a debate about what it means to "think." We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc. Now, we do. Partly because of this we don't have really well defined ways to define these terms and think about. Can a handheld calculator think? Certainly, depending on how we define "think."
Somebody please get Wittgenstein on the phone
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#485Having 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…
Counterpoint: The seahorse emoji. The output repeats the same simple pattern of giving a bad result and correcting it with another bad result until it runs out of attempts. There is no reasoning, no diagnosis, just the same error over and over again within a single session.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#486Earlier 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.
That's a skill issue on your end
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#487Having 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…
Counterpoint: The seahorse emoji. The output repeats the same simple pattern of giving a bad result and correcting it with another bad result until it runs out of attempts. There is no reasoning, no diagnosis, just the same error over and over again within a single session.
A system having terminal failure modes doesn't inherently negate the rest of the system. Human intelligences fall prey to plenty of similarly bad behaviours like addiction.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. What's your definition of consciousness, let's start there. 2. Absolutely, it's a spectrum. Insects have function. 3. "Humans navigate maps built by other humans through language." You said it yourself. They use this exact same data, so why won't they know it if they used it. Humans are their bodies in the physical world.
1. I don't need to define consciousness to point out that you're using an unproven claim ('consciousness is probably an illusion') as the foundation of your argument. That's circular reasoning. 2. 'It's a spectrum' doesn't address the point. You claimed LLMs approximate brain function because they have similar architecture. Massive structural variation in biological brains producing similar function undermines that c…
1. You do. You probably have a different version of that and are saying I'm wrong merely for not holding your definition.
2. That directly addresses your point. In abstract it shows they're basically no different to multimodal models, train with different data types and it still works, perhaps even better. They train LLMs with images, videos, sound, and nowadays even robot sensor feedback, with no fundamental changes to the architecture see Gemini 2.5.
3. That's merely an additional input point, give it sensors or have a human relay that data. Your toe is relaying it's sensor information to your brain.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm genuinely curious what you work on that is so "novel" that an LLM doesn't work well on? I feel like so little is TRUELY novel. Almost everything is built on older concepts and to some degree expertise can be applied or repurposed.
Anything relatively new in a technology LLMs struggle with, especially if the documentation is lacking.
Godot for example in ChatGPT.
It may no longer still be the case, but the documentation for GoDot was lacking and often samples written by others didn't have a version number associated with it. So samples it would suggest would never work, and even when you told it the version number it failed to generate workable code.
The other stuff I've noticed is custom systems. One I work with is a variation of Java, but LLMs were treating it as javascript. I had to create a LoRA just to get the model from not trying to write javascript answer. Even then it could never work, because it had never been trained on real world examples.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#490Having 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…
> You can add stuff to their context, but they never get better at doing things, don't really understand feedback.
I was using Claude Code today and it was absolutely capable of taking feedback to change behavior?