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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#651

Post by ForHackernews »

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…

But all those times the same system produces irrational gibberish don't count? GPT-5 will commonly make mistakes no thinking human could ever make.

Human: I'm trying to get my wolf, sheep and cabbage across the river in this boat, but the wolf keeps eating the sheep or the sheep eats the cabbage

Bot: You should put the sheep in the boat and take it across — if we delve into the biology of Canis lupus we discover that wolves don't eat cabbage!

H: Ok, so that worked great so far, the sheep is on one side and the wolf/cabbage is on the other.

B: Now, Option 1 is to bring the wolf across, or Option 2 you can bring the cabbage. I recommend (2) taking the cabbage as cabbages are smaller and easier to transport in a boat.

H: But then the sheep eats the cabbage, right? Remember that?

B: Exactly, that's sharp thinking. If you put the sheep and the cabbage together on the same side of the river, the sheep is sure to devour the cabbage. We need to not just separate sheep from cabbages — we need to separate cabbages from sheep! :rocketship:

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#652

Post by lukebuehler »

felipeerias wrote: post #610
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…

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)…

I agree that the term can muddy the waters, but as a shorthand for roughly "an agent calling an LLM (or several LLMs) in a loop producing similar economic output as a human knowledge-worker", then it is useful. And if you pay attention to the AI leaders, then that's what the defintion has become.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#653

Post by DebtDeflation »

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…

>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

It's still just information retrieval. You're just dividing it into internal information (the compressed representation of the training data) and external information (web search, API calls to systems, etc). There is a lot of hidden knowledge embedded in language and LLMs do a good job of teasing it out that resembles reasoning/thinking but really isn't.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#654

Post by sonicvroooom »

vectorized thinking in vectorized context is math.

coding logical abduction into LLMs completely breaks them while humans can perfectly roll with it, albeit it's worth emphasizing that some might need a little help from chemistry or at least not be caught on the wrong foot.

you're welcome, move on.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#655

Post by zulban »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #276

all this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically. To be clear, I don't believe that current AI t…

"but nobody seems worried of that implication that"

Clearly millions of people are worried about that, and every form of media is talking about it. Your hyperbole means it's so easy to dismiss everything else you wrote.

Incredible when people say "nobody is talking about X aspect of AI" these days. Like, are you living under a rock? Did you Google it?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#656

Post by idiotsecant »

felipeerias wrote: post #610
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…

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)…

I think it has a practical, easy definition. Can you drop an AI into a terminal, give it the same resources as a human, and reliably get independent work product greater than that human would produce across a wide domain? If so, it's an AGI.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#657

Post by lukebuehler »

keiferski wrote: post #547
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…

Personally I think that kind of discussion is fruitless, not much more than entertainment. If you’re asking big questions like “can a machine think?” Or “is an AI conscious?” without doing the work of clarifying your concepts, then you’re only going to get vague ideas, sci-fi cultural tropes, and a host of other things. I think the output question is also interesting enough on its own, because we can talk about the p…

I do think it raises interesting and important philosophical questions. Just look at all the literature around the Turing test--both supporters and detractors. This has been a fruitful avenue to talk about intelligence even before the advent of gpt.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#658

Post by killerstorm »

marliechiller wrote: post #603
killerstorm wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Again, people were using words for thousands of years before there were any dictionaries/linguists/academics.

Top-down theory of word definitions is just wrong. People are perfectly capable of using words without any formalities.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#659

Post by rcxdude »

ben_w wrote: post #615
jiggawatts wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A long time ago I noticed that I sometimes already had a complete thought before my inner monologue turned it into words. A few times I tried skipping the inner monologue because I'd clearly already thought the thought. Turns out the bit of my brain that creates the inner monologue from the thought, can generate a sense of annoyance that the rest of my brain can feel. Not that it matters, there's evidence that while…

Indeed, and it seems like they would really struggle to output coherent text at all if there was not some kind of pre-planning involved (see how even humans struggle with it in games where you have to construct a sentance by having each person shout out one word at a time). Even GPT-2 likely had at least some kind of planning for the next few words in order to be as coherent as it was.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#660

Post by heresie-dabord »

techblueberry wrote: post #640
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…

Isn’t anthropomorphizing LLMs rather than understanding their unique presence in the world a “ lack of imagination and flexibility of thought”? It’s not that I can’t imagine applying the concept “thinking” to the output on the screen, I just don’t think it’s an accurate description.

Yes, it's an example of domain-specific thinking. "The tool helps me write code, and my job is hard so I believe this tool is a genius!"

The Roomba vacuumed the room. Maybe it vacuumed the whole apartment. This is good and useful. Let us not diminish the value of the tool. But it's a tool.

The tool may have other features, such as being self-documenting/self-announcing. Maybe it will frighten the cats less. This is also good and useful. But it's a tool.

Humans are credulous. A tool is not a human. Meaningful thinking and ideation is not just "a series of steps" that I will declaim as I go merrily thinking. There is not just a vast training set ("Reality"), but also our complex adaptability that enables us to test our hypotheses.

We should consider what it is in human ideation that leads people to claim that a Roomba, a chess programme, Weizenbaum's Eliza script, the IBM's Jeopardy system Watson, or an LLM trained on human-vetted data is thinking.

Train such a system on the erroneous statements of a madman and suddenly the Roomba, Eliza, IBM Watson (and these other systems) lose our confidence.

As it is today, the confidence we have in these systems is very conditional. It doesn't matter terribly if code is wrong... until it does.

Computers are not humans. Computers can do things that humans cannot do. Computers can do these things fast and consistently. But fundamentally, algorithms are tools.

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