What is thinking, and what is not? what are the finite set of properties that once you remove one it's no longer thinking?
"Thinking" as a concept is just a vague predicate, just like being alive or dead.
The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#682Having 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…
It might appear so, but then you could validate it with a simple test.
If the LLM would play a 4x4 Tic Tac Toe game, would the agent select the winning move 100% of all time or block a losing move 100% of the time?
If these systems were capable of proper reasoning, then they would find the right choice in these obvious but constantly changing scenarios without being specifically trained for it.
[1] https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/nemotron-vs-qwen-game-theory...
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#683Having 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…
> The world is full of bizarre wonders and this is just one more to add to the list.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've also experienced this, to an extent, but on qualitative topics the goodness of an answer - beyond basic requirements like being parseable and then plausible - is difficult to evaluate. They can certainly produce good-sounding answers, but as to the goodness of the advice they contain, YMMV.
I've certainly got useful and verifiable answers. If you're not sure about something you can always ask it to justify it and then see if the arguments make sense.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#685Earlier 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…
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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#686Earlier 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…
> 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
you know this because you're a cognitive scientist right? or because this is the consensus in the field?
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#687Earlier 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…
Okay, fine, let's remove the evolution part. We still have an incredible amount of our lifetime spent visualising the world and coming to conclusions about the patterns within. Our analogies are often physical and we draw insights from that. To say that humans only draw their information from textbooks is foolhardy; at the very least, you have to agree there is much more.
I realise upon reading the OP's comment again that they may have been referring to "extrapolation", which is hugely problematic from the statistical viewpoint when you actually try to break things down.
My argument for compression asserts that LLMs see a lot of knowledge, but are actually quite small themselves. To output a vast amount of information in such a small space requires a large amount of pattern matching and underlying learned algorithms. I was arguing that humans are actually incredible compressors because we have many years of history in our composition. It's a moot point though, because it is the ratio of output to capacity that matters.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
how do you definitely know that?
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#689Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different PoV: You have a local bug and ask the digital hive mind for a solution, but someone already solved the issue and their solution was incorporated... LLMs are just very effficient at compressing billions of solutions into a few GB. Try to ask something no one ever came up with a solution so far.
This argument comes up often but can be easily dismissed. Make up a language and explain it to the LLM like you would to a person. Tell it to only use that language now to communicate. Even earlier AI was really good at this. You will probably move the goal posts and say that this is just pattern recognition, but it still fits nicely within your request for something that no one ever came up with.
> but it still fits nicely within your request for something that no one ever came up with
YOU came up with it dawg