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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#521

Post by 9rx »

educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

> Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words

We understand thinking as being some kind of process. The problem is that we don't understand the exact process, so when we have these discussions the question is if LLMs are using the same process or an entirely different process.

> instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabilities.

This doesn't resolve anything as you can reach the same outcome using a different process. It is quite possible that LLMs can do everything a thinking entity can do all without thinking. Or maybe they actually are thinking. We don't know — but many would like to know.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#522

Post by bongodongobob »

aydyn wrote: post #519
XenophileJKO wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Literally anything in the science domain. Adding features to your software app is indeed usually not novel.

That's where the bar is now?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#523

Post by lordnacho »

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 agree with you.

If you took a Claude session into a time machine to 2019 and called it "rent a programmer buddy," how many people would assume it was a human? The only hint that it wasn't a human programmer would be things where it was clearly better: it types things very fast, and seems to know every language.

You can set expectations in the way you would with a real programmer: "I have this script, it runs like this, please fix it so it does so and so". You can do this without being very precise in your explanation (though it helps) and you can make typos, yet it will still work. You can see it literally doing what you would do yourself: running the program, reading the errors, editing the program, and repeating.

People need to keep in mind two things when they compare LLMs to humans: you don't know the internal process of a human either, he is also just telling you that he ran the program, read the errors, and edited. The other thing is the bar for thinking: a four-year old kid who is incapable of any of these things you would not deny as a thinking person.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#524

Post by aydyn »

didibus wrote: post #402
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.

We do know at the biochemical level how neurons work, and it isnt anything like huge matmuls.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#525

Post by MrScruff »

almosthere wrote: post #73
famouswaffles wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot say, 'we know it's not thinking because we wrote the code' when the inference 'code' we wrote amounts to, 'Hey, just do whatever you figured out during training okay'. 'Power over your computer', all that is orthogonal to the point. A human brain without a functioning body would still be thinking.

Well, a model by itself with data that emits a bunch of human written words is literally no different than what JIRA does when it reads a database table and shits it out to a screen, except maybe a lot more GPU usage. I permit you, that yes, the data in the model is a LOT more cool, but some team could by hand, given billions of years (well probably at least 1 Octillion years), reproduce that model and save it to a d…

You're getting to the heart of the problem here. At what point in evolutionary history does "thinking" exist in biological machines? Is a jumping spider "thinking"? What about consciousness?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#526

Post by teaearlgraycold »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #453
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more people could feel this. Having used psychedelics a few times it’s illuminating to finally see the inside of your brain from a different perspective. I often wonder what would happen to the world if everyone had this experience. How many modern humans live their entire lives in the shallow mental states of survival, acceptance, or consumption? How would humanity’s course change if every adult got the gut p…

One of the notable effects of psychedelics is that you come to strongly believe that everyone should try them and that it will be enlightening for them.

Ha, definitely :P

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#527

Post by bongodongobob »

hattmall wrote: post #435
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not spending the time to de-anyonymize and exfiltrate my work for you. I exert less energy, spend less time to do my work, and get paid the same. I'd encourage you to do the same.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#528

Post by donkeybeer »

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…

Its overt or unaware religion. The point when you come down to the base of it is that these people believe in "souls".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#529

Post by aryehof »

mbesto wrote: post #36
famouswaffles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not write the code that makes it do what it does. We write the code that trains it to figure out how to do what it does. There's a big difference.

I think the discrepancy is this: 1. We trained it on a fraction of the world's information (e.g. text and media that is explicitly online) 2. It carries all of the biases us humans have and worse the biases that are present in the information we chose to explicitly share online (which may or may not be different to the experiences humans have in every day life)

I see this a lot in what LLMs know and promote in terms of software architecture.

All seem biased to recent buzzwords and approaches. Discussions will include the same hand-waving of DDD, event-sourcing and hexagonal services, i.e. the current fashion. Nothing of worth apparently preceded them.

I fear that we are condemned to a future where there is no new novel progress, but just a regurgitation of those current fashion and biases.

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