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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

newyorker.com

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#821

Post by echelon »

Tade0 wrote: post #801
naasking wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!).

But a simulated mind is not a mind. This was already debated years ago with the aid of the Chinese Room thought experiment.

> But a simulated mind is not a mind.

How would the mind know which one it is?

Maybe your mind is being simulated right now.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#822

Post by FloorEgg »

procaryote wrote: post #483
FloorEgg wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already answered under the other comment asking me why and if your curious I suggest looking for it. Very short answer is Karl Friston's free energy pricniple

LLMs work nothing like Karl Friston's free energy principle though

LLMs embody the free-energy principle computationally. They maintain an internal generative model of language and continually minimize “surprise”, the difference between predicted and actual tokens, during both training and infeence. In Friston’s terms, their parameters encode beliefs about the causes of linguistic input; forward passes generate predictions, and backpropagation adjusts internal states to reduce prediction error, just as perception updates beliefs to minimize free energy. During inference, autoregressive generation can be viewed as active inference: each new token selection aims to bring predicted sensory input (the next word) into alignment with the model’s expectations. In a broader sense, LLMs exemplify how a self-organizing system stabilizes itself in a high-dimensional environment by constantly reducing uncertainty about its inputs, a synthetic analogue of biological systems minimizing free energy to preserve their structural and informational coherence.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#823

Post by doctorpangloss »

qntmfred wrote: post #745
utopiah wrote: post #677

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?

we didn't really previously NEED to, but we still tried bc it was an interesting question. today the NEED seems more urgent

sometimes hacker news links are about doing free work for microsoft, like finding bugs in Windows and Office

sometimes hacker news links are about doing free work for microsoft, like rigorously defining AGI, because that triggers the OpenAI license-to-stock conversion now

maybe this is why microsoft makes so much fucking money. Even the New Yorker cannot stop fucking doing work for them for free.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#824

Post by notepad0x90 »

slightwinder wrote: post #759
notepad0x90 wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only means they have specialized, deeper contextualized information no, LLMs can have that contextualized information. understanding in a reasoning sense means classifying the thing and developing a deterministic algorithm to process it. If you don't have a deterministic algorithm to process it, it isn't understanding. LLMs learn to approximate, we do that too, but then we develop algorithms to process input and ge…

> understanding in a reasoning sense means classifying the thing and developing a deterministic algorithm to process it. That's the learning-part I was talking about. Which is mainly supported by humans at the moment, which why I called it proto-intelligence. > If you don't have a deterministic algorithm to process it, it isn't understanding. Commercial AIs like ChatGPT do have the ability to call programs and integr…

> That's the learning-part I was talking about. Which is mainly supported by humans at the moment, which why I called it proto-intelligence.

Maybe it's just semantics, but I don't think LLMs even come close to a fruit fly's intelligence. Why can't we recognize and accept them for what they are, really powerful classifiers of data.

> Commercial AIs like ChatGPT do have the ability to call programs and integrate the result in their processing. Those AIs are not really just LLMs. The results are still rough and poor, but the concept is there and growing.

Yeah RAG and all of that, but those programs use deterministic algorithms. Now, if LLMs generated programs they call on as tools, that would be much more like the proto-intelligence you're talking about.

Semantics are boring, but it's important that we're not content or celebrate early by calling it what it isn't.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#825

Post by notepad0x90 »

naasking wrote: post #794
DebtDeflation wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

reasoning might be a better term to discuss as it is more specific?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#826

Post by Philadelphia »

People have a very poor conception of what is easy to find on the internet. The author is impressed by the story about Chat GPT telling his friend how to enable the sprinkler system for his kids. But I decided to try just googling it — “how do i start up a children's park sprinkler system that is shut off” — and got a Youtube video that shows the same thing, plus a lot of posts with step by step directions. No AI needed. Certainly no evidence of advanced thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#828

Post by nickledave »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #744
nickledave wrote: post #723

I'm not going to read this -- I don't need to. The replies here are embarrassing enough. This is what happens when our entire culture revolves around the idea that computer programmers are the most special smartest boys. If you even entertain even for a second the idea that a computer program that a human wrote is "thinking", then you don't understand basic facts about: (1) computers, (2) humans, and (3) thinking. Ou…

So A doesn’t X because that’s what B does because Y? I think before you excoriate the hacker news commentariat for their midwittery and hubris that you should proofread these arguments. There are many things that live, but, as we imagined it, do not “think”. Even what defines a “thought“ is an open question. Also, I ain’t gonna read your coffee table science book.

Where did I say that everything that is alive thinks?

You can't even read posts clearly, so don't waste your time trying to finish your first book.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#829

Post by pixl97 »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #762
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…

What does it mean? My stance is it's (obviously and only a fool would think otherwise) never going to be conscious because consciousness is a physical process based on particular material interactions, like everything else we've ever encountered. But I have no clear stance on what thinking means besides a sequence of deductions, which seems like something it's already doing in "thinking mode".

> is a physical process based on particular material interactions,

This is a pretty messy argument as computers have been simulating material interactions for quite some time now.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#830

Post by chpatrick »

stinos wrote: post #813
chpatrick wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

one of which is niche, recent, handmade and doesn't have any public documentation I still see 2 possibilities: you asked it something similar enough that it came up with a fairly standard answer which just happened to be correct, or you gave it enough info. - for example you created a new line of MCUs called FrobnicatorV2, and asked is 'how do I connect a power supply X to FrobnicatorV2' and it gave an answer like 'c…

If a human uses their general knowledge of electronics to answer a specific question they haven't seen before that's obviously thinking. I don't see why LLMs are held to a different standard. It's obviously not repeating an existing answer verbatim because that doesn't exist in my case.

You're saying it's nothing "special" but we're not discussing whether it's special, but whether it can be considered thinking.

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