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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#661

Post by rcxdude »

geon wrote: post #377
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 incoherent, nonsensical and invalid chains of reasoning... LLMs are little more than RNGs. They are the tea leaves and you read whatever you want into them.

They are clearly getting to useful and meaningful results with at a rate significantly better than chance (for example, the fact that ChatGPT can play chess well even though it sometimes tries to make illegal moves shows that there is a lot more happening there than just picking moves uniformly at random). Demanding perfection here seems to be odd given that humans also can make bizarre errors in reasoning (of course, generally at a lower rate and in a distribution of kinds of errors we are more used to dealing with).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#662

Post by zulban »

bondarchuk wrote: post #645
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…

There is simply no hope to get 99% of the population to accept that a piece of software could ever be conscious even in theory. I'm mildly worried about the prospect but I just don't see anything to do about it at all. (edit: A few times I've tried to share Metzinger's "argument for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology" here but it didn't gain any traction)

Give it time. We'll soon have kids growing up where their best friend for years is an AI. Feel however you like about that, but those kids will have very different opinions on this.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#664

Post by killerstorm »

keiferski wrote: post #611
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…

You’re mixing and missing a few things here. 1. All previous discussion of thinking was in nature to human and animal minds. The reason this is a question in the first place right now is because we ostensibly have a new thing which looks like a human mind but isn’t. That’s the question at hand here. 2. The question in this particular topic is not about technological “progress” or anything like it. It’s about determin…

1. Not true. People have been trying to analyze whether mechanical/formal processes can "think" since at least 18th century. E.g. Leibniz wrote:

> if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects in so far as they are amenable to reasoning accomplish what is done in arithmetic and geometry

2. You're missing the fact that meaning of words is defined through their use. It's an obvious fact that if people call certain phenomenon "thinking" then they call that "thinking".

3. The normal process is to introduce more specific terms and keep more general terms general. E.g. people doing psychometrics were not satisfied with "thinking", so they introduced e.g. "fluid intelligence" and "crystallized intelligence" as different kinds of abilities. They didn't have to redefine what "thinking" means.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#665

Post by GoblinSlayer »

saberience wrote: post #648
hodgehog11 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's compression. Although your later comments neglect the many years of physical experience that humans have as well as the billions of years of evolution. And yes, by this definition, LLMs pass with flying colours.

I hate when people bring up this “billions of years of evolution” idea. It’s completely wrong and deluded in my opinion. Firstly humans have not been evolving for “billions” of years. Homo sapiens have been around for maybe 300’000 years, and the “homo” genus has been 2/3 million years. Before that we were chimps etc and that’s 6/7 million years ago. If you want to look at the entire brain development, ie from mouse…

>Most of evolution was us running around just killing stuff and eating and having sex.

Tell Boston Dynamics how to do that.

Mice inherited brain from their ancestors. You might think you don't need a working brain to reason about math, but that's because you don't know how thinking works, it's argument from ignorance.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#666

Post by awillen »

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…

This is it - it's really about the semantics of thinking. Dictionary definitions are: "Have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something." and "Direct one's mind toward someone or something; use one's mind actively to form connected ideas."

Which doesn't really help because you can of course say that when you ask an LLM a question of opinion and it responds, it's having an opinion or that it's just predicting the next token and in fact has no opinions because in a lot of cases you could probably get it to produce the opposite opinion.

Same with the second definition - seems to really hinge on the definition of the word mind. Though I'll note the definitions for that are "The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought." and "A person's intellect." Since those specify person, an LLM wouldn't qualify, though of course dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive, so fully possible that meaning gets updated by the fact that people start speaking about LLMs as though they are thinking and have minds.

Ultimately I think it just... doesn't matter at all. What's interesting is what LLMs are capable of doing (crazy, miraculous things) rather than whether we apply a particular linguistic label to their activity.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#667

Post by dagss »

mrob wrote: post #142

I don't believe LLMs can be conscious during inference because LLM inference is just repeated evaluation of a deterministic [0] pure function. It takes a list of tokens and outputs a set of token probabilities. Any randomness is part of the sampler that selects a token based on the generated probabilities, not the LLM itself. There is no internal state that persists between tokens [1], so there can be no continuity o…

Thinking != consciousness

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#668

Post by marliechiller »

killerstorm wrote: post #658
marliechiller wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd argue the presence of dictionaries proves the exact opposite. People realised there was an issue of talking past one another due to inexact definitions and then came to an agreement on those definitions, wrote them down and built a process of maintaining them.

In any case, even if there isnt a _single_ definition of a given subject, in order to have a discussion around a given area, both sides need to agree on some shared understanding to even begin to debate in good faith in the first place. It's precisely this lack of definition which causes a breakdown in conversation in a myriad of different areas. A recent obvious (morbid) example would be "genocide".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#669

Post by notepad0x90 »

slightwinder wrote: post #592
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…

> 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…

humans, and even animals track different "variables" or "entities" and distinct things with meaning and logical properties which they then apply some logical system on those properties to compute various outputs. LLMs see everything as one thing, in case of chat-completion models, they're completing text. in case of image generation, they're completing an image.

Look at it this way, two students get 100% on an exam. One learned the probability of which multiple choice options have the likelihood of being most correct based on how the question is worded, they have no understanding of the topics at hand, and they're not performing any sort of topic-specific reasoning. They're just good at guessing the right option. The second student actually understood the topics, reasoned, calculated and that's how they aced the exam.

I recently read about a 3-4 year old that impressed their teacher by reading perfectly a story book like an adult. it turns out, their parent read it to them so much, they can predict based on page turns and timing the exact words that need to be spoken. The child didn't know what an alphabet, word,etc.. was they just got so good at predicting the next sequence.

That's the difference here.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#670

Post by mentos »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #422
mentos wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have examples of non sentience everywhere already with animals. And then an example of sentience with humans. So if you diff our brains the difference lies within a module in our prefrontal cortex. It’s a black box of logic but I can ‘understand’ or be willing to accept that it’s owed to ‘just’ more grey matter adding the self awareness to the rest of the system. But to me the big mystery is how animals have sensa…

I'd like to see a vote here, what percentage of HN readers believe animals have sentience or no sentience? Clearly most animals are less educated, and most are less intelligent, but non-sentient? That sounds like 200-year old claims that "when one steps on the tail of a cat, it does indeed protest loudly, but not because it feels anything or because it would be sentient, no, no, it protests merely due to selective pr…

I should have been more exact and said sentience vs sapience in animals vs humans.
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