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

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#791

Post by naasking » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

burnte wrote: post #785

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…

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard P. Feynman They're not thinking, we're just really good at seeing patterns and reading into things. Remember, we never evolved with non-living things that could "talk", we're not psychologically prepared for this level of mimicry yet. We're still at the stage of Photography when people didn't know about double ex…

You're just assuming that mimicry of a thing is not equivalent to the thing itself. This isn't true of physical systems (simulated water doesn't get you wet!) but it is true of information systems (simulated intelligence is intelligence!).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#792

Post by bunderbunder » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #699

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…

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…

> Never before have we looked at image classifications and decided that's how the eye works

Actually we have, several times. But the way we arrived at those conclusions is worth observing:

1. ML people figure out how the ML mechanism works.

2. Neuroscientists independently figure out how brains do it.

3. Observe any analogies that may or may not exist between the two underlying mechanisms.

I can't help but notice how that's a scientific way of doing it. By contrast, the way people arrive at similar conclusions when talking about LLMs tends to consist of observing that two things are cosmetically similar, so they must be the same. That's not just pseudoscientific; it's the mode of reasoning that leads people to believe in sympathetic magic.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#793

Post by naasking » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:24 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…

> don't get why you would say that. it's just auto-completing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

> If it thought and reasoned, it would know to ignore those and focus on the variables and input at hand to produce deterministic and consistent output

You only do this because you were trained to do this, eg. to see symmetries and translations.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#794

Post by naasking » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #653

ako wrote: post #480

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…

> LLMs do a good job of teasing it out that resembles reasoning/thinking but really isn't.

Given the fact that "thinking" still hasn't been defined rigourously, I don't understand how people are so confident in claiming they don't think.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#795

Post by blks » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

skeeter2020 wrote: post #709

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…

This feels too linear. Machines are great at ingesting huge volumes of data, following relatively simple rules and producing optimized output, but are LLMs sufficiently better than humans at finding windy, multi-step connections across seemingly unrelated topics & fields? Have they shown any penchant for novel conclusions from observational science? What I think your ratio misses is the value in making the targeted e…

Are you aware of anything novel, produced by an LLM?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#796

Post by engintl » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:28 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…

by your logic we can't say that we as humans are "thinking" either or that we are "intelligent".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#797

Post by chpatrick » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

hitarpetar wrote: post #688

chpatrick wrote: post #600

Earlier 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.

how do you definitely know that?

Because I gave them a unique problem I had and it came up with an answer it definitely didn't see in the training data.

Specifically I wanted to know how I could interface two electronic components, one of which is niche, recent, handmade and doesn't have any public documentation so there's no way it could have known about it before.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#798

Post by naasking » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

staticman2 wrote: post #743

Workaccount2 wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no true and untrue claims about how the brain works, because we have no idea how it works. 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 c…

>>>There are no true and untrue claims about how the brain works, because we have no idea how it works. Which is why if you pick up a neuroscience textbook it's 400 pages of blank white pages, correct? There are different levels of understanding. I don't need to know how a TV works to know there aren't little men and women acting out the TV shows when I put them on. I don't need to know how the brain works in detail…

> I don't need to know how the brain works in detail to know claims that humans are doing the same things as LLMs to be similarly silly.

Yes you do. It's all computation in the end, and isomorphisms can often be surprising.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#799

Post by libraryatnight » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

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…

If you're sensitive to patterns and have been chronically online for the last few decades it's obvious they are not thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#800

Post by bloppe » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

lbrandy wrote: post #429

bloppe wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Nagel put it best in 1974: https://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-... Essentially, something is conscious iff "there is something that it is like to be" that thing. Some people find that completely unsatisfying, some people think it's an insight of utter genius. I'm more in the latter camp. Also, I think consciousness is non-binary. Something could be semi-conscious, or more or less consc…

> Anyway, I don't think that there's anything that it's like to be an LLM. I don't see how anybody who knows how they actually work could think that. While I have almost zero belief that LLMs are conscious, I just don't think this is so trivially asserted. The easy half of this is thinking that LLMs aren't conscious given what we know about how they work. The hard part (and very, very famously so) is explaining how _…

I wouldn't say that we actually know how our brains work. Based mainly on my neuroscience minor from 10 years ago I'd say that understanding feels hopelessly far away.