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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#671

Post by notepad0x90 »

IanCal wrote: post #475
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's just auto-completing. It cannot reason Auto completion just means predicting the next thing in a sequence. This does not preclude reasoning. > I don't get why you would say that. Because I see them solve real debugging problems talking through the impact of code changes or lines all the time to find non-obvious errors with ordering and timing conditions on code they’ve never seen before.

> This does not preclude reasoning.

It does not imply it either. to claim reasoning you need evidence. it needs to reliably NOT hallucinate results for simple conversations for example (if it has basic reasoning).

> Because I see them solve real debugging problems talking through the impact of code changes or lines all the time to find non-obvious errors with ordering and timing conditions on code they’ve never seen before.

Programming languages and how programs work are extensively and abundantly documented, solutions to problems and how to approach them,etc.. have been documented on the internet extensively. It takes all of that data and it completes the right text by taking the most correct path way based on your input. it does not actually take your code and debug it. it is the sheer volume of data it uses and the computational resources behind it that are making it hard to wrap your head around the difference between guessing and understanding. You too can look at enough stack overflow and (poorly) guess answers for questions without understanding anything about the topic and if you guess enough you'll get some right. LLMs are just optimized to get the amount of correct responses to be high.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#672

Post by [deleted] »

pmarreck wrote: post #635
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…

So it seems to be a semantics argument. We don't have a name for a thing that is "useful in many of the same ways 'thinking' is, except not actually consciously thinking" I propose calling it "thunking"

[deleted]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#673

Post by utopiah »

xanderlewis wrote: post #469
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…

> I don't get why you would say that. Because it's hard to imagine the sheer volume of data it's been trained on.

And because ALL the marketing AND UX around LLMs is precisely trying to imply that they are thinking. It's not just the challenge of grasping the ridiculous amount of resources poured in, which does including training sets, it's because actual people are PAID to convince everybody those tools are actually thinking. The prompt is a chatbox, the "..." are there like a chat with a human, the "thinking" word is used, the "reasoning" word is used, "hallucination" is used, etc.

All marketing.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#674

Post by dagss »

Consider this:

If you just took a time machine 10 years back, and asked people to label activities done by the humans/the human brain as being "thinking" or not...

...I feel rather certain that a lot of those activities that LLM do today we would simply label "thinking" without questioning it further.

Myself I know that 10 years ago I would certainly have labelled an interactive debug loop where Claude adds debug log output, reruns tests, diagnose the log output, and fixes the bug -- all on its own initiative -- to be "thinking".

Lots of comments here discussion what the definition of the word "thinking" is. But it is the advent of AI itself that is making us question that definition at all, and that is kind of a revolution itself.

This question will likely be resolved by us figuring out that the word "thinking" is ill-defined and not useful any longer; and for most people to develop richer vocabularies for different parts of human brain activity and consider some of them to be more "mechanical". It will likely not be resolved by AI getting to a certain "level". AI is so very different to us yet can do so many of the same things, that the words we commonly use start breaking down.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#675

Post by notepad0x90 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #470
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…

The vast majority of human “thinking” is autocompletion. Any thinking that happens with words is fundamentally no different to what LLMs do, and everything you say applies to human lexical reasoning. One plus one equals two. Do you have a concept of one-ness, or two-ness, beyond symbolic assignment? Does a cashier possess number theory? Or are these just syntactical stochastic rules? I think the problem here is the d…

We do a lot of autocompletion and LLMs overlap with that for sure. I don't know about the "vast majority" even basic operations like making sure we're breathing or have the right hormones prompted are not guesses but deterministic algorithmic ops. Things like object recognition and speech might qualify as autocompletion. But let's say you need to setup health-monitoring for an application. that's not an autocomplete operation. you must evaluate various options, have opinions on it, weigh priorities,etc.. in other words, we do autocompletion but even then the autocompletion is a basic building block or tool we use in constructing more complex decision logic.

If you train an animal to type the right keys on a keyboard that generates a hello world program, you didn't just teach them how to code. they just memorized the right keys that lead to their reward. a human programmer understands the components of the code, the intent and expectations behind it, and can reason about how changes would affect outcomes. the animal just knows how the reward can be obtained most reliably.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#676

Post by hackinthebochs »

isaacremuant wrote: post #632
gkbrk wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people would agree that submarines are swimming.

No. Cars don't walk. Submarines don't swim. You can call it navigation if you want but words have meaning. > to move through water by moving the body or parts of the body.

Spinning propellers is "moving parts of the [submarines] body"

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#677

Post by utopiah »

everdrive wrote: post #77

This is merely a debate about what it means to "think." We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc. Now, we do. Partly because of this we don't have really well defined ways to define these terms and think about. Can a handheld calculator think? Certainly, depending on how we define "think."

> We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc.

Eh... Plato would like a word with you. Philosophy has been specifically trying to disentangle all that for millennia. Is this a joke?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#678

Post by bena »

Edman274 wrote: post #316
bena wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase Jean Luc Picard: Am I conscious? Why? Can you prove that I am conscious?

Maybe Jean Luc Picard should've lost that court case. Obviously we as the audience want to have our heroes win against some super callous guy who wants to kill our hero (and audience stand in for anyone who is neurodivergent) Data, but the argument was pretty weak, because Data often acted in completely alien ways that jeopardized the safety of the crew, and the way that those issues came up was due to him doing thin…

First of all, Data never willingly jeopardized the crew.

Second, they work alongside actual aliens. Being different is not a disqualification. And Maddox isn't callous, he just doesn't regard Data as anything more than "just a machine". A position he eventually changes over the series as he becomes one of Data's friends.

Data is also not a stand in for the neurodivergent. He's the flip of Spock. Spock asks us what if we tried to approach every question from a place of pure logic and repressed all emotion. Data asks us what if we didn't have the option, that we had to approach everything from logic and couldn't even feel emotion. I also feel that equating data to someone who is neurodivergent is kind of insulting as neurodivergent people do have feelings and emotions.

But Data was capable of being fully autonomous and could act with agency. Something a rock can't. Data exhibits characteristics we generally accept as conscious. He is not only capable of accessing a large corpus of knowledge, but he is capable of building upon that corpus and generate new information.

Ultimately, we cannot prove a rock is not conscious. But, as far as we are able to discern, a rock cannot express a desire. That's the difference. Data expressed a desire. The case was whether or not Starfleet had to respect that desire.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#679

Post by smohare »

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…

[dead]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#680

Post by saberience »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #665
saberience wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You've missed the point entirely.

People argue that humans have had the equivalent of training a frontier LLM for billions of years.

But training a frontier LLM involves taking multiple petabytes of data, effectively all of recorded human knowledge and experience, every book ever written, every scientific publication ever written, all of known maths, science, encylopedias, podcasts, etc. And then training that for millions of years worth of GPU-core time.

You cannot possibly equate human evolution with LLM training, it's ridiculous.

Our "training" time didn't involve any books, maths, science, reading, 99.9999% of our time was just in the physical world. So you can quite rationally argue that our brains ability to learn without training is radically better and more efficient that the training we do for LLMs.

Us running around in the jungle wasn't training our brain to write poetry or compose music.

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