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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#601

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

You wrote your comment one word at a time, with the next word depending on the previous words written.

You did not plan the entire thing, every word, ahead of time.

LLMs do the same thing, so... how is your intelligence any different?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#602

Post by slightwinder »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #410
layer8 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience (feeling something), and therefore the ability to suffer. It isn’t clear at all that the latter is a thing outside of the context of a biological brain’s biochemistry. It also isn’t clear at all that thinking or consciousness would somehow require that the condition of the automaton that performs these functions would need to be meaningful to…

>Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience... Sure, but all the examples of conscious and/or thinking beings that we know of have, at the very least, the capacity to suffer. If one is disposed to take these claims of consciousness and thinking seriously, then it follows that AI research should, at minimum, be more closely regulated until further evidence can be discovered one way or t…

Emotions and suffering are "just" necessary feedback for the system to evaluate it's internal and external situation. It's similar to how modern machines have sensors. But nobody would say a PC is suffering and enslaved, just because the CPU is too hot or the storage is full.

It's probably the sentience-part which makes it harmful for the mind.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#603

Post by marliechiller »

killerstorm wrote: post #598
keiferski wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the word already means what we think it means.

But that word can mean different things to different people. With no definition, how can you even begin to have a discussion around something?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#605

Post by omnicognate »

tim333 wrote: post #570
omnicognate wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's about priors again. I don't need evidence that humans think like humans. My prior on that is absolute certainty that they do, by definition. If, on the other hand, you wanted to persuade me that the kid was using an image classifier trained by backpropagation and gradient descent to recognise the dog I'd require strong evidence.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#606

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

popalchemist wrote: post #553
ako wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most AI tooling is shipped with a feedback loop around the LLM. The quality of Claude Code for example lies in the feedback loop it provides on your code. Maybe the LLM itself isn't thinking, but the Agent which ships an LLM plus feedback loop definitely shows thinking qualities. Just now in an debugging session with claude code: * let me read this file... * let me read this file... * I think there's a caching issue…

without getting into theory of mind it's a bit difficult to elaborate, and I don't have the time or the will for that. But the short version is that thinking is interconnected with BEING as well as will, and the Agent has neither, in a philosophically formal sense. The agent is deterministically bound. So it is a fancy Rube Goldberg machine that outputs letters in a way that creates the impression of thought, but it…

The obvious counterargument is that a calculator doesn't experience one-ness, but it still does arithmetic better than most humans.

Most people would accept that being able to work out 686799 x 849367 is a form of thinking, albeit an extremely limited one.

First flight simulators, then chess computers, then go computers, then LLMs are the same principle extended to much higher levels of applicability and complexity.

Thinking in itself doesn't require mysterious qualia. It doesn't require self-awareness. It only requires a successful mapping between an input domain and an output domain. And it can be extended with meta-thinking where a process can make decisions and explore possible solutions in a bounded space - starting with if statements, ending (currently) with agentic feedback loops.

Sentience and self-awareness are completely different problems.

In fact it's likely with LLMs that we have off-loaded some of our cognitive techniques to external hardware. With writing, we off-loaded memory, with computing we off-loaded basic algorithmic operations, and now with LLMs we have off-loaded some basic elements of synthetic exploratory intelligence.

These machines are clearly useful, but so far the only reason they're useful is because they do the symbol crunching, we supply the meaning.

From that point of view, nothing has changed. A calculator doesn't know the meaning of addition, an LLM doesn't need to know the meaning of "You're perfectly right." As long as they juggle symbols in ways we can bring meaning to - the core definition of machine thinking - they're still "thinking machines."

It's possible - I suspect likely - they're only three steps away from mimicking sentience. What's needed is a long-term memory, dynamic training so the model is constantly updated and self-corrected in real time, and inputs from a wide range of physical sensors.

At some point fairly soon robotics and LLMs will converge, and then things will get interesting.

Whether or not they'll have human-like qualia will remain an unknowable problem. They'll behave and "reason" as if they do, and we'll have to decide how to handle that. (Although more likely they'll decide that for us.)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#607

Post by versteegen »

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…

Yes, but it's not just memory hierarchy on which plain transformer-based LLMs are handicapped, there are many deficiencies. (For example, why must they do all their thinking upfront in thinking blocks rather than at any point when they become uncertain?) I'm not sure why you link memory to introspection.

This is why so many people (especially those that think they understand LLM limitations) massively underestimate the future progress of LLMs: people everywhere can see architectural problems and are working on fixing them. These aren't fundamental limitations of large DNN language models in general. Architecture can be adjusted. Turns out you can even put recurrence back in (SSMs) without worse scalability.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#609

Post by dns_snek »

sdenton4 wrote: post #571
dns_snek wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Clever. Yes, humans can be terrible at reasoning too, but in any half decent technical workplace it's so rare for people to fail to apply logic as often and in ways that are as frustrating to deal with as LLMs. And if they are then they should be fired.

I can't say I remember a single coworker that would fit this description though many were frustrating to deal with for other reasons, of course.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#610

Post by felipeerias »

lukebuehler wrote: post #543
keiferski wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

The discussion about “AGI” is somewhat pointless, because the term is nebulous enough that it will probably end up being defined as whatever comes out of the ongoing huge investment in AI.

Nevertheless, we don’t have a good conceptual framework for thinking about these things, perhaps because we keep trying to apply human concepts to them.

The way I see it, a LLM crystallises a large (but incomplete and disembodied) slice of human culture, as represented by its training set. The fact that a LLM is able to generate human-sounding language

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