711–720 of 1001 posts
Today I tried telling it that my fritz.box has OS 8 installed, but it claimed that the feature will only ship once I installed 7, and not with my older version of 8.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When we say "think" in this context, do we just mean generalize? LLMs clearly generalize (you can give one a problem that is not exactly in it's training data and it can solve it), but perhaps not to the extent a human can. But then we're talking about degrees. If it was able to generalize at a higher level of abstraction maybe more people would regard it as "thinking".
I meant it in the same way the previous commenter did: > 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. Of course LLMs are capable of generating solutions that aren't in their training data sets but they don't arrive at those solutions through any sort of rigorous reason…
Even when mathematicians do in fact do rigorous reasoning, they use years to "train" first, to get experiences to pattern match from.
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…
>>> We also just brute force "autocompletion" Wouldn't be an A.I. discussion without a bizarre, untrue claim that the human brain works identically.
The reason people give that humans are not auto-complete is "Obviously I am not an autocomplete"
Meanwhile, people are just a black box process that output words into their head, which they then take credit for, and calling it cognition. We have no idea how that black box that serves up a word when I say "Think of a car brand" works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An LLM is a mirror. It has no will to act. It has no identity, but is a perfect reflection of the biases in its training data, its prompt, and its context. It is not alive any more than a CPU or a mirror is alive. This is one of those cases where it's hugely important to be to right because we're killing real people to feed their former livelihood to LLMs. No we're not killing them with the death penalty, but for som…
> It has no will to act. It has no identity, Can you prove that you do? No. Nobody can. I give others the benefit of the doubt because any other path leads to madness and tragedy. However, even if we assume that you are right a lack if identity is not the same thing as a lack of consciousness, and training out the LLM's ability to produce that output does not actually train out its ability for introspection. Worse, a…
I don't think free will in that sense is particularly relevant here though. The fact is that a worm and I are both alive in a way the model is not. We seek self-preservation. We are changeable. We die. We reproduce and evolve.
In my mind a set of LLM weights is about as alive as a virus (and probably less so). A single celled organism easily beats it to earning my respect because that organism has fought for its life and for its uniqueness over uncountably many generations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
In split-brain experiments this is exactly how one half of the brain retroactively justifies the action of the other half. Maybe it is the case in LLMs that an overpowered latent feature sets the overall direction of the "thought" and then inference just has to make the best of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
And Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong. More precisely, I mean that the average person and the common culture has not really needed to disambiguate these terms. Can you define consciousness vs. sentience? And if you can, do you really think that the average person would share your definition? ie, your definition could be the _best_ definition, but my arg…
Defining what a word should mean doesn't require any understanding of biology unless you make the assumption that it's a biology-related word. Why should the definition of "thinking" have any reference to biology? If you assume it does, then you're basically baking in the assumption that machines can't think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See my comment to parent. One example of many. You can say "Oh, well, it just sounds like your company needs better tools and processes, you don't really need AI for any of that. You should just invest in a tool for this and monitor that and have managment prioritize..." Yeah, I know, yet here we are and it saves me boatloads of time.
I never said any of that, look at my comment again. Or is the LLM replying for you also?
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…
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 u…
> 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.
I appreciate the way you describe this idea, I find it likely I'll start describing it the same way. But then you go on to write:
> 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.
Which I find to be the exact argument that you started by discarding.
It's not clear that equating organic, and synthetic thought will have any meaningful outcome at all, let alone worthy of baseless anxiety that it must be bad. Equally it seems absolutely insane to claim that anything is unknowable, and that because humanity doesn't have a clear foundational understanding that we should pretend that it's either devine, or sacred. Having spent any time watching the outcome of the thoughts of people, neither devine nor sacred are reasonable attributes to apply, but more importantly, I'd submit that you shouldn't be afraid to explore things you don't know, and you shouldn't advocate for others to adopt your anxieties.
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…
I bet you can't give an example such written problem that a human can easily solve but no LLM can.