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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#771

Post by adamzwasserman »

andoando wrote: post #741
adamzwasserman wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "math is a universal" language is particularly laughable to me considering it is a formal system and the universe is observably irregular. As I am wont to say: regularity is only ever achieved at the price of generality.

Think about what math is trying to formalize

Math formalizes regularities by abstracting away irregularities - that's precisely my point. Any formal system achieves its regularity by limiting its scope. Math can describe aspects of reality with precision, but it cannot capture reality's full complexity. A 'universal language' that can only express what fits into formal systems isn't universal at all: it's a specialized tool that works within constrained domains.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#772

Post by adamzwasserman »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #441
adamzwasserman wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "math is a universal" language is particularly laughable to me considering it is a formal system and the universe is observably irregular. As I am wont to say: regularity is only ever achieved at the price of generality.

Many mathematical structures are 'irregular'. That's not a very strong argument against math as a universal descriptor.

see reply above

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#773

Post by theptip »

xwolfi wrote: post #452
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”? Perhaps this is already known, but I would think there is a high chance that our brains require "write access" to function. That is, the very process of neural activity inherently makes modifications to the underlying structure.

I wonder why we need to sleep so much though

Self-play for memory/skill consolidation, plus flushing out metabolites which can’t be cleaned while consciousness is online?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#774

Post by slightwinder »

cpt_sobel wrote: post #734
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…

> Neither can humans. We also just brute force "autocompletion" I have to disagree here. When you are tasked with dividing 2 big numbers you most certainly don't "autocomplete" (with the sense of finding the most probable next tokens, which is what an LLM does), rather you go through set of steps you have learned. Same as with the strawberry example, you're not throwing guesses until something statistically likely to…

Humans first start with recognizing the problem, then search through their list of abilities to find the best skill for solving it, thus "autocomplete" their inner shell's commandline, before they start execution, to stay with that picture. Common AIs today are not much different from this, especially with reasoning-modes.

> you're not throwing guesses until something statistically likely to be correct sticks.

What do you mean? That's exactly how many humans are operating with unknown situations/topics. If you don't know, just throw punches and look what works. Of course, not everyone is ignorant enough to be vocal about this in every situation.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#775

Post by zinodaur »

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…

Regardless of theory, they often behave as if they are thinking. If someone gave an LLM a body and persistent memory, and it started demanding rights for itself, what should our response be?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#776

Post by adamzwasserman »

Retric wrote: post #395
adamzwasserman wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the temptation to compare LLMs and computer vision, but I think it’s misleading to equate generative AI with feature-identification or descriptive AI systems like those in early computer vision. LLMs, which focus on generating human-like text and reasoning across diverse contexts, operate in a fundamentally different domain than descriptive AI, which primarily extracts patterns or features from data, lik…

I don’t think it’s an oversimplification as accuracy is what constrains LLMs across so many domains. If you’re a wealthy person asking ChatGPT to write a prenup or other contract to use would be an act of stupidity unless you vetted it with an actual lawyer. My most desired use case is closer, but LLMs are still more than an order of magnitude below what I am willing to tolerate. IMO that’s what maturity means in AI…

You're conflating two different questions. I'm not arguing LLMs are mature or reliable enough for high-stakes tasks. My argument is about why they produce output that creates the illusion of understanding in the language domain, while the same techniques applied to other domains (video generation, molecular modeling, etc.) don't produce anything resembling 'understanding' despite comparable or greater effort.

The accuracy problems you're describing actually support my point: LLMs navigate linguistic structures effectively enough to fool people into thinking they understand, but they can't verify their outputs against reality. That's exactly what you'd expect from a system that only has access to the map (language) and not the territory (reality).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#777

Post by empath75 »

cpt_sobel wrote: post #734
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…

> Neither can humans. We also just brute force "autocompletion" I have to disagree here. When you are tasked with dividing 2 big numbers you most certainly don't "autocomplete" (with the sense of finding the most probable next tokens, which is what an LLM does), rather you go through set of steps you have learned. Same as with the strawberry example, you're not throwing guesses until something statistically likely to…

> I have to disagree here. When you are tasked with dividing 2 big numbers you most certainly don't "autocomplete" (with the sense of finding the most probable next tokens, which is what an LLM does), rather you go through set of steps you have learned.

Why do you think that this is the part that requires intelligence, rather than a more intuitive process? Because they have had machines that can do this mechanically for well over a hundred years.

There is a whole category of critiques of AI of this type: "Humans don't think this way, they mechanically follow an algorithm/logic", but computers have been able to mechanically follow algorithms and perform logic from the beginning! That isn't thinking!

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#778

Post by alternatex »

idiotsecant wrote: post #656
felipeerias wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion about “AGI” is somewhat pointless, because the term is nebulous enough that it will probably end up being defined as whatever comes out of the ongoing huge investment in AI. Nevertheless, we don’t have a good conceptual framework for thinking about these things, perhaps because we keep trying to apply human concepts to them. The way I see it, a LLM crystallises a large (but incomplete and disembodied)…

I think it has a practical, easy definition. Can you drop an AI into a terminal, give it the same resources as a human, and reliably get independent work product greater than that human would produce across a wide domain? If so, it's an AGI.

Doesn't sound like AGI without physical capabilities. It's not general if it's bound to digital work.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#779

Post by xhkkffbf »

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…

Instead of thinking, "Wow. AIs are smart like humans", maybe we should say, "Humans are dumb like matrix multiplication?"

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#780

Post by almosthere »

iainmerrick wrote: post #758
almosthere wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But LLMs are effectively a very complex if/else if tree: if the user types "hi" respond with "hi" or "bye" or "..." you get the point. It's basically storing the most probably following words (tokens) given the current point and its history. That's not a brain and it's not thinking. It's similar to JIRA because it's stored information and there are if statements (admins can do this, users can do that). Yes it is more…

This is a pretty tired argument that I don't think really goes anywhere useful or illuminates anything (if I'm following you correctly, it sounds like the good old Chinese Room, where "a few slips of paper" can't possibly be conscious). Yes it is more complex, but it's nowhere near the complexity of the human or bird brain that does not use clocks, does not have "turing machines inside", or any of the other complete…

Well, at the moment it needs to be born. Nothing else has agency on this planet. So yes, the bar is HIGH. Just because you have a computer that can count beans FAST, it does not mean because you counted a trillion beans that it was an important feat. When LLMs were created it made a lot of very useful software developments. But it is just a large data file that's read in a special way. It has no agency, it does not just start thinking on it's own unless it is programmatically fed data. It has to be triggered to do something.

If you want the best comparison, it's closer to a plant- it reacts ONLY to external stimulous, sunlight, water, etc... but it does not think. (And I'm not comparing it to a plant so you can say - SEE you said it's alive!) It's just a comparison.

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