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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#561

Post by mycall »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #548
lukebuehler wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cannot the say they are "thinking", "intelligent" while we do not have a good definition--or, even more difficult, unanimous agreement on a definition--then the discussion just becomes about output. They are doing useful stuff, saving time, etc, which can be measured. Thus also the defintion of AGI has largely become: "can produce or surpass the economic output of a human knowledge worker". But I think this detrac…

Heres a definition. How impressive is the output relative to the input. And by input, I don't just mean the prompt, but all the training data itself. Do you think someone who has only ever studied pre-calc would be able to work through a calculus book if they had sufficient time? how about a multi-variable calc book? How about grad level mathematics? IMO intelligence and thinking is strictly about this ratio; what ca…

Animals think but come with instincts which breaks the output relative to the input test you propose. Behaviors are essentially pre-programmed input from millions of years of evolution, stored in the DNA/neurology. The learning thus typically associative and domain-specific, not abstract extrapolation.

A crow bending a piece of wire into a hook to retrieve food demonstrates a novel solution extrapolated from minimal, non-instinctive, environmental input. This kind of zero-shot problem-solving aligns better with your definition of intelligence.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#562

Post by coopierez »

gf000 wrote: post #472
DanHulton wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). > So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it You're going off the rails IMMEDIATELY in your logic. Sure, one Turing-complete computer language can have its logic "emulated" by another, fine. But human intelligence is not a computer language -- you're mixing up the terms "Turing complete" and "Turing test…

Game of life, PowerPoint, and a bunch of non-PL stuff are all Turing-complete. I don't mix up terms, I did use a slightly sloppy terminology but it is the correct concept - and my point is that we don't know of a computational model that can't be expressed by a Turing-machine, humans are a physical "machine", ergo we must also fall into that category. Give my comment another read, but it was quite understandable from…

But humans can do things Turing machines cannot. Such as eating a sandwich.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#563

Post by mycall »

mft_ wrote: post #123

Personal take: LLMs are probably part of the answer (to AGI?) but are hugely handicapped by their current architecture: the only time that long-term memories are formed is during training, and everything after that (once they're being interacted with) sits only in their context window, which is the equivalent of fungible, fallible, lossy short-term memory. [0] I suspect that many things they currently struggle with c…

MIT have developed a technique called Self-Adapting Language Models (SEAL), which enables LLMs to continuously improve by generating their own synthetic training data and updating their internal parameters in response to new information.

ToolAlpaca, InterCode and Reflexion are taking different approaches among others.

LLMs of tomorrow will be quite different.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#564

Post by tomhow »

player1234 wrote: post #533
dimator wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#565

Post by Manfred »

darthvaden wrote: post #542
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…

If AI is thinking if slavery is bad then how can somebody own AI. How can investors can shares from AI profits? We are ok with slavery now. Ok i will have two black slaves now. Who can ask me? Why shld that be illegal?

Yikes, you're bypassing thousands of years of oppression, abuse, and human suffering by casually equating a term that is primarily associated with a human owning another human to a different context.

There is a way to discuss if keeping intelligent artificial life under servitude without using those terms, especially if you're on a new account.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#566

Post by absurd1st »

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…

[dead]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#567

Post by Uehreka »

richardatlarge wrote: post #484
everdrive wrote: post #77

This 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

Here you go: (holds up phone with a photo of of Wittgenstein on the screen)

Ah shoot, that’s not what you meant is it? Just use more precise language next time and I’m sure you’ll be understood.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#568

Post by IanCal »

zahlman wrote: post #135
IanCal wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't be sycophantic. Disagree and push back when appropriate. They can do this though. > Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, without any external input? I don’t see any why not, but then humans don’t have zero input so I’m not sure why that’s useful.

> but then humans don’t have zero input Humans don't require input to, say, decide to go for a walk. What's missing in the LLM is volition .

LLMs can absolutely generate output without input but we don’t have zero input. We don’t exist in a floating void with no light or sound or touch or heat or feelings from our own body.

But again this doesn’t see to be the same thing as thinking. If I could only reply to you when you send me a message but could reason through any problem we discuss just like “able to want a walk” me could, would that mean I no longer could think? I think these are different issues.

On that though, these see trivially solvable with loops and a bit of memory to write to and read from - would that really make the difference for you? A box setup to run continuously like this would be thinking?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#569

Post by tim333 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #451
tim333 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if it incorporates? Corporations are people, my friend.

I know you are making some silly political jab, but the bill would prevent AIs from incorporating, since you'd have to be a person to do that in the first place.

I was kind of joking but if you wanted an AI to have power in the real world you'd probably set up a company for it to run, or if the AI was smart enough it could find a nominee to set up the company. They could ban in one state or country but they could just set up somewhere else.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#570

Post by tim333 »

omnicognate wrote: post #391
tim333 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a high bar for thinking like humans which rules out 99.99% of humans.

I have never claimed that only people/machines that can do frontier maths research can be intelligent. (Though someone always responds as if I did.) I said that a machine doing frontier maths research would be sufficient evidence to convince me that it is intelligent. My prior is very strongly that LLM's do not think like humans so I require compelling evidence to conclude that they do. I defined one such possible pi…

I know what you mean but was just thinking people vary a lot in their requirements as to what they will accept as thinking. People show a kid a photo and say what's that and they say I think it's a dog and that's taken as evidence of thinking. With AI people want it to win a Nobel prize or something.
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