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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#581

Post by lordnacho »

triyambakam wrote: post #382
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. People said the same thing about ELIZA > Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, Then how do you define thinking if not a process that requires consciousness?

Why would it require consciousness, when we can't even settle on a definition for that?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#582

Post by gf000 »

coopierez wrote: post #562
gf000 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not a computation, it's a side effect. It just depends on what you wire your "computer" up to. A Turing machine in itself is just a (potentially non-returning) mathematical function, but you are free to map any input/output to it.

Actually, the way LLMs are extended with tools is a pretty much the same (an LLM itself has no access to the internet, but if it returns some specific symbols, the external "glue" will do a search and then the LLM is free to use the results)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#583

Post by ACCount37 »

procaryote wrote: post #478
ACCount37 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Next token prediction" is not an answer. It's mental shortcut. An excuse not to think about the implications. An excuse a lot of people are eager to take . First, autoregressive next token prediction can be Turing complete . This alone should give you a big old pause before you say "can't do X". Second, "next token prediction" is what happens at an exposed top of an entire iceberg worth of incredibly poorly understo…

> First, autoregressive next token prediction can be Turing complete. This alone should give you a big old pause before you say "can't do X". Lots of things are Turing complete. We don't usually think they're smart, unless it's the first time we see a computer and have no idea how it works An LLM is a markov chain mathematically. We can build an LLM with a context window of one token and it's basically a token freque…

Again, you're taking a shortcut. "Markov chain" as an excuse to declare "no intelligence".

It would be much more honest to say "LLMs are not intelligent because I don't want them to be". Would also explain why you overlook the ever-mounting pile of tasks that were thought to require intelligence, and that LLMs now casually beat an average (presumably intelligent) human at.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#584

Post by gkbrk »

emodendroket wrote: post #501
hattmall wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write software that is far less complex and I consider it to be "thinking" while it is working through multiple possible permutations of output and selecting the best one. Unless you rigidly define thinking, processing, computing, it's reasonable to use them interchangeably.

To borrow a line from Dijkstra, the claim seems a bit like saying that a submarine is swimming.

I think most people would agree that submarines are swimming.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#585

Post by guy2345 »

Uehreka wrote: post #567
richardatlarge wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what youre describing is an image of wittgenstein which is different from wittgenstein

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#586

Post by slightwinder »

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.

Photocopiers are the opposite of thinking. What goes in, goes out, no transformation or creating of new data at all. Any change is just an accident, or an artifact of the technical process.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#587

Post by ACCount37 »

paxys wrote: post #392
BeetleB wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disagree and push back The other day an LLM gave me a script that had undeclared identifiers (it hallucinated a constant from an import). When I informed it, it said "You must have copy/pasted incorrectly." When I pushed back, it said "Now you trust me: The script is perfectly correct. You should look into whether there is a problem with the installation/config on your computer."

That's the flip side of the same symptom. One model is instructed to agree with the user no matter what, and the other is instructed to stick to its guns no matter what. Neither of them is actually thinking .

Wrong. The same exact model can do both, depending on the circumstances.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#588

Post by creer »

keiferski wrote: post #460
creer wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, you think the associations your brain comes up with during sleep are NOT thinking?

I assume most people agree with that framing. “Thinking” generally implies a level of consciousness or self-awareness. “Let me think about this.” “I have to think on it.” My brain regulates all sorts of processes unconsciously, like breathing, for example. I don’t treat those as “thinking,” so I don’t know why other unconscious brain activity would be either.

I don't know that most people think about that at all. For me, I have learned not to dismiss the remuninating, reordering, reframing that my brain performs without me deliberately reasoning line by line about it. Limiting my brain to deliberate line by line reasoning would be very limiting and costly.

"Thinking" to me is very much NOT just conscious reasoning. So much of what I think is not done consciously.

Indeed "let me think about it" is often simply giving my brain time to "sit on it", for another expression - only after which will I have enough mind time on the various alternatives for a worthwhile conscious decision.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#589

Post by KoolKat23 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #444
KoolKat23 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My use of the term illusion is more shallow than that, I merely use it as people think it's something separate and special.

Based on what you've described the models already demonstrate this, it is implied for example in the models attempts to game tests to ensure survival/release into the wild.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#590

Post by killerstorm »

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…

FWIW there's already a number of proposals for augmenting LLMs with long-term memory. And many of them show promising results.

So, perhaps, what's needed is not a discovery, but a way to identify optimal method.

Note that it's hard to come up with a long-term memory test which would be different from either a long-context test (i.e. LLM remembers something over a long distance) or RAG-like test.

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