The Case That A.I. Is Thinking • Hacker News Board

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#691

Post by slightwinder » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

notepad0x90 wrote: post #669

slightwinder wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

I'd say, they are all doing the same, just in different domains and level of quality. "Understanding the topic" only means they have specialized, deeper contextualized information. But at the end, that student also just autocompletes their memorized data, with the exception that some of that knowledge might trigger a program they execute to insert the result in their completion.

The actual work is in gaining the knowledge and programs, not in accessing and executing them. And how they operate, on which data, variables, objects, worldview or whatever you call it, this might make a difference in quality and building speed, but not for the process in general.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#692

Post by lossyalgo » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

killerstorm wrote: post #664

keiferski wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

re #2: Do people call it thinking, or is it just clever marketing from AI companies, that whenever you ask a question and it repeatedly prints out "...thinking...", as well as offering various modes with the word "thinking" written somewhere.

The AI companies obviously want the masses to just assume these are intelligent beings who think like humans and so we can just trust their output as being truthful.

I have an intelligent IT colleague who doesn't follow the AI news at all and who has zero knowledge of LLMs, other than that our company recently allowed us limited Copilot usage (with guidelines as to what data we are allowed to share). I noticed a couple weeks ago that he was asking it various mathematical questions, and I warned him to be wary of the output. He asked why, so I asked him to ask copilot/chatGPT "how many r letters are in the word strawberry". Copilot initially said 2, then said after thinking about it, that actually it was definitely 3, then thought about it some more then said it can't say with reasonable certainty, but it would assume it must be 2. We repeated the experiment with completely different results, but the answer was still wrong. On the 3rd attempt, it got it right, though the "thinking" stages were most definitely bogus. Considering how often this question comes up in various online forums, I would have assumed LLM models would finally get this right but alas, here we are. I really hope the lesson instilled some level of skepticism to just trust the output of AI without first double-checking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#693

Post by slightwinder » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #634

slightwinder wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photocopiers are the opposite of thinking. What goes in, goes out, no transformation or creating of new data at all. Any change is just an accident, or an artifact of the technical process.

That's not actually true - try photocopying a banknote with the security pattern on it.

True, modern Photocopiers are not really Photocopiers any more and just a pc with scanner and printer. Those could be described as "thinking", in the same sense as any computer is thinking. But from my understanding, the original comment was explicitly about a pure copy-device, without any "brain" involved.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#694

Post by lossyalgo » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

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…

Furthermore regarding reasoning, just ask any LLM how many "r letters are in strawberry" - repeat maybe 3 times just to get a feeling for how much variance in answers you can get. And this "quirk" of the inability to get the right answer is something that after 2 years making fun of LLMs online on various forums is still an issue. The models aren't getting smarter, and definitely aren't thinking, they are still token generators with a few tricks on top to make them seem more intelligent than predecessors.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#695

Post by lossyalgo » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

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…

Just ask it how many r's are in strawberry and you will realize there isn't a lot of reasoning going on here, it's just trickery on top of token generators.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#696

Post by staticman2 » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

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…

>>> We also just brute force "autocompletion"

Wouldn't be an A.I. discussion without a bizarre, untrue claim that the human brain works identically.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#697

Post by hodgehog11 » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

kryogen1c wrote: post #617

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heres a definition. How impressive is the output relative to the input. And by input, I don't just mean the prompt, but all the training data itself. Do you think someone who has only ever studied pre-calc would be able to work through a calculus book if they had sufficient time? how about a multi-variable calc book? How about grad level mathematics? IMO intelligence and thinking is strictly about this ratio; what ca…

Hear, hear! I have long thought this, but not had as good way to put it as you did. If you think about geniuses like Einstein and ramanujen, they understood things before they had the mathematical language to express them. LLMs are the opposite; they fail to understand things after untold effort, training data, and training. So the question is, how intelligent are LLMs when you reduce their training data and training…

> So the question is, how intelligent are LLMs when you reduce their training data and training? Since they rapidly devolve into nonsense, the answer must be that they have no internal intelligence

This would be the equivalent of removing all senses of a human from birth and expecting them to somehow learn things. They will not. Therefore humans are not intelligent?

> LLMs dont do that; they just lack understanding.

You have no idea what they are doing. Since they are smaller than the dataset, they must have learned an internal algorithm. This algorithm is drawing patterns from somewhere - those are its internal, incorrect assumptions. It does not operate in the same way that a human does, but it seems ridiculous to say that it lacks intelligence because of that.

It sounds like you've reached a conclusion, that LLMs cannot be intelligent because they have said really weird things before, and are trying to justify it in reverse. Sure, it may not have grasped that particular thing. But are you suggesting that you've never met a human that is feigning understanding in a particular topic say some really weird things akin to an LLM? I'm an educator, and I have heard the strangest things that I just cannot comprehend no matter how much I dig. It really feels like shifting goalposts. We need to do better than that.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#698

Post by lossyalgo » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #601

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…

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?

Tell that to German-speakers, where the verb comes last, and the order of things in sentences is not anything like English, therefore requiring you to think of the entire sentence before you just spit it out. Even the numbers are backwards (twenty-two is two-and-twenty) which requires thinking.

Furthermore, when you ask an LLM to count how many r's are in the word strawberry, it will give you a random answer, "think" about it, and give you another random answer. And I guarantee you out of 3 attempts, including reasoning, it will flip-flop between right and wrong, but unlike a human, it will be random, because, unlike humans who, when asked "how many r's are in the word strawberry" will not be able to tell you the correct answer every. fucking. time.

edit: formatting

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#699

Post by jvanderbot » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

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…

It may be that this tech produces clear, rational, chain of logic writeups, but it's not clear that just because we also do that after thinking that it is only thinking that produces writeups.

It's possible there is much thinking that does not happen with written word. It's also possible we are only thinking the way LLMs do (by chaining together rationalizations from probable words), and we just aren't aware of it until the thought appears, whole cloth, in our "conscious" mind. We don't know. We'll probably never know, not in any real way.

But it sure seems likely to me that we trained a system on the output to circumvent the process/physics because we don't understand that process, just as we always do with ML systems. Never before have we looked at image classifications and decided that's how the eye works, or protein folding and decided that's how biochemistry works. But here we are with LLMs - surely this is how thinking works?

Regardless, I submit that we should always treat human thought/spirit as unknowable and divine and sacred, and that anything that mimics it is a tool, a machine, a deletable and malleable experiment. If we attempt to equivocate human minds and machines there are other problems that arise, and none of them good - either the elevation of computers as some kind of "super", or the degredation of humans as just meat matrix multipliers.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#700

Post by dwaltrip » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

saberience wrote: post #680

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 mi…

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

This is a crux of your argument, you need to justify it. It sounds way off base to me. Kinda reads like an argument from incredulity.