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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#571

Post by sdenton4 »

dns_snek wrote: post #495
khafra wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generalizing your experience to everyone else's betrays a lack of imagination. One guy is generalizing from "they don't work for me" to "they don't work for anyone." The other one is saying "they do work for me, therefore they do work for some people." Note that the second of these is a logically valid generalization. Note also that it agrees with folks such as Tim Gowers, who work on novel and hard problems.

No, that's decidedly not what is happening here. One is saying "I've seen an LLM spectacularly fail at basic reasoning enough times to know that LLMs don't have a general ability to think" (but they can sometimes reproduce the appearance of doing so). The other is trying to generalize "I've seen LLMs produce convincing thought processes therefore LLMs have the general ability to think" (and not just occasionally repr…

s/LLM/human/

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#572

Post by gabriel666smith »

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…

I've spent a few weeks building and using a terminal LLM client based on that RLM paper that was floating around a little while ago. It's single-conversation, with a tiny, sliding context window, and then a tool that basically fuzzy searches across our full interaction history. It's memory is 'better' than mine - but anything that is essentially RAG inherently will be.

My learning so far, to your point on memory being a limiting factor, is that the system is able to build on ideas over time. I'm not sure you'd classify that as 'self-learning', and I haven't really pushed it in the direction of 'introspection' at all.

Memory itself (in this form) does not seem to be a silver bullet, though, by any means. However, as I add more 'tools', or 'agents', its ability to make 'leaps of discovery' does improve.

For example, I've been (very cautiously) allowing cron jobs to review a day's conversation, then spawn headless Claude Code instances to explore ideas or produce research on topics that I've been thinking about in the chat history.

That's not much different from the 'regular tasks' that Perplexity (and I think OpenAI) offer, but it definitely feels more like a singular entity. It's absolutely limited by how smart the conversation history is, at this time, though.

The Memento analogy you used does feel quite apt - there is a distinct sense of personhood available to something with memory that is inherently unavailable to a fresh context window.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#573

Post by throwaway-0001 »

simulator5g wrote: post #442
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.

I’ve seen so many humans bring stupid. Definitively there is nothing in the brain.

You see how doesn’t make sense what you saying?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#576

Post by noiv »

brabel wrote: post #482
noiv wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ask ChatGPT about ConLang. It knows. Inventing languages was solved a hundred years ago with Esperanto.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#577

Post by throwaway-0001 »

xwolfi wrote: post #452
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wonder why we need to sleep so much though

Rebalancing weights?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#578

Post by throwaway-0001 »

josefx wrote: post #485
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…

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.

You never had that coleague that says yes to everything and can’t get anything done? Same thing as seahorse.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#579

Post by dns_snek »

tmhn2 wrote: post #554
aydyn wrote: post #414

Earlier 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.

Research mathematicians have been finding the tools useful [1][2]. I think those problems are interesting, novel, and hard. The AI might stumble sometimes, but it also produces meaningful, quality results sometimes. For experts working on interesting problems, that is enough to be useful. [1] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115420236285085121 [2] https://xcancel.com/wtgowers/status/1984340182351634571

That's a motte and bailey fallacy. Nobody said that they aren't useful, the argument is that they can't reason [1]. The world is full of useful tools that can't reason or think in any capacity.

[1] That does not mean that they can never produce texts which describes a valid reasoning process, it means that they can't do so reliably. Sometimes their output can be genius and other times you're left questioning if they even have the reasoning skills of a 1st grader.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#580

Post by gkbrk »

gloosx wrote: post #535
madaxe_again wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of human “thinking” is autocompletion. Any thinking that happens with words is fundamentally no different to what LLMs do, and everything you say applies to human lexical reasoning. One plus one equals two. Do you have a concept of one-ness, or two-ness, beyond symbolic assignment? Does a cashier possess number theory? Or are these just syntactical stochastic rules? I think the problem here is the d…

> Any thinking that happens with words is fundamentally no different from what LLMs do. This is such a wildly simplified and naive claim. "Thinking with words" happens inside a brain, not inside a silicon circuit with artificial neurons bolted in place. The brain is plastic, it is never the same from one moment to the next. It does not require structured input, labeled data, or predefined objectives in order to learn…

LLMs are increasingly trained on images for multi-modal learning, so they too would have seen one object, then two.
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