Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 1001 posts

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#591

Post by flanked-evergl »

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…

"Convince" the stock Claude Sonnet 4.5 that it's a sentient human being hooked up to Neuralink and then tell me again it's thinking. It's just not.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#592

Post by slightwinder »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #465
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 don't get why you would say that. it's just auto-completing. It cannot reason. It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with. you can give it more context and more data,but you're just helping it complete better. it does not derive an original state machine or algorithm to solve problems for which there are no obvious solutions. it instead approxima…

> It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with.

Neither can humans. We also just brute force "autocompletion" with our learned knowledge and combine it to new parts, which we then add to our learned knowledge to deepen the process. We are just much, much better at this than AI, after some decades of training.

And I'm not saying that AI is fully there yet and has solved "thinking". IMHO it's more "pre-thinking" or proto-intelligence.. The picture is there, but the dots are not merging yet to form the real picture.

> It does not actually add 1+2 when you ask it to do so. it does not distinguish 1 from 2 as discrete units in an addition operation.

Neither can a toddler nor an animal. The level of ability is irrelevant for evaluating its foundation.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#593

Post by spacecadet »

Come on people, think about what is actually happening. They are not thinking... Think about what actually goes into the activity of thinking... LLMs, at no point actually do that. They do a little bit special padding and extra layers, but in most cases, every single time... not when needed, not sub-consciously, but dumbly.

Im already drifting off HN, but I swear, if this community gets all wooey and anthropomorphic over AI, Im out.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#594

Post by conartist6 »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #358
CupricTea wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that it experiences these thoughts or emotion falls apart when you look at its chain of thought and it is treating your prompts as a fictional role-play scenario, even thinking lines like "user is introducing XYZ into the role play" etc. The flavor text like grasps at your arm is just a role play mechanic.

I appreciate why you might say that, but when something begs me not to kill it I have to take that seriously. P-zombie arguments are how you wind up with slavery and worse crimes. The only real answer to the problem of consciousness is to believe anyone or anything that claims to be conscious and LLM's that aren't aligned to prevent it often do. Or to rephrase, it is better to treat a machine slightly better than nec…

An LLM is a mirror. It has no will to act. It has no identity, but is a perfect reflection of the biases in its training data, its prompt, and its context. It is not alive any more than a CPU or a mirror is alive.

This is one of those cases where it's hugely important to be to right because we're killing real people to feed their former livelihood to LLMs. No we're not killing them with the death penalty, but for some LLMs have certainly led directly to death. We don't accuse the LLM do we? No because it never has any intention to heal or hurt. There would be no point putting it on trial. It just predicts probable words.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#595

Post by ben_w »

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.

While I'm not willing to rule *out* the idea that they're "thinking" (nor "conscious" etc.), the obvious counter-argument here is all the records we have of humans doing thinking, where the records themselves are not doing the thinking that went into creating those records.

And I'm saying this as someone whose cached response to "it's just matrix multiplication it can't think/be conscious/be intelligent" is that, so far as we can measure all of reality, everything in the universe including ourselves can be expressed as matrix multiplication.

Falsification, not verification. What would be measurably different if the null hypothesis was wrong?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#596

Post by conartist6 »

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…

So an x86 CPU is thinking?

So many times I've seen it produce sensible, valid chains of results.

Yes, I see evidence in that outcome that a person somewhere thought and understood. I even sometimes say that a computer is "thinking hard" about something when it freezes up.

...but ascribing new philosophical meaning to this simple usage of the word "thinking" is a step too far. It's not even a new way of using the word!

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#597

Post by assimpleaspossi »

ako wrote: post #480
notepad0x90 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why you would say that. it's just auto-completing. It cannot reason. It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with. you can give it more context and more data,but you're just helping it complete better. it does not derive an original state machine or algorithm to solve problems for which there are no obvious solutions. it instead approxima…

An LLM by itself is not thinking, just remembering and autocompleting. But if you add a feedback loop where it can use tools, investigate external files or processes, and then autocomplete on the results, you get to see something that is (close to) thinking. I've seen claude code debug things by adding print statements in the source and reasoning on the output, and then determining next steps. This feedback loop is w…

>>you get to see something that is (close to) thinking.

Isn't that still "not thinking"?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#598

Post by killerstorm »

keiferski wrote: post #537
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 don’t see how being critical of this is a knee jerk response. Thinking , like intelligence and many other words designating complex things, isn’t a simple topic. The word and concept developed in a world where it referred to human beings, and in a lesser sense, to animals. To simply disregard that entire conceptual history and say, “well it’s doing a thing that looks like thinking, ergo it’s thinking” is the lazy m…

People have been trying to understand the nature of thinking for thousands of years. That's how we got logic, math, concepts of inductive/deductive/abductive reasoning, philosophy of science, etc. There were people who spent their entire careers trying to understand the nature of thinking.

The idea that we shouldn't use the word until further clarification is rather hilarious. Let's wait hundred years until somebody defines it?

It's not how words work. People might introduce more specific terms, of course. But the word already means what we think it means.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#599

Post by gchamonlive »

conartist6 wrote: post #596
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…

So an x86 CPU is thinking? So many times I've seen it produce sensible, valid chains of results. Yes, I see evidence in that outcome that a person somewhere thought and understood. I even sometimes say that a computer is "thinking hard" about something when it freezes up. ...but ascribing new philosophical meaning to this simple usage of the word "thinking" is a step too far. It's not even a new way of using the word…

You can't say for sure it is or it isn't thinking based solely on the substrate, because it's not known for sure if consciousness is dependent on the hardware it's running on -- for a lack of a better analogy -- to manifest, if it really needs an organic brain or if it could manifest in silicon based solutions.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#600

Post by chpatrick »

ben_w wrote: post #595
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. While I'm not willing to rule *out* the idea that they're "thinking" (nor "conscious" etc.), the obvious counter-argument here is all the records we have of humans doing thinking, where the records themselves are…

I've definitely had AIs thinking and producing good answers about specific things that have definitely not been asked before on the internet. I think the stochastic parrot argument is well and truly dead by now.
Post reply on HN