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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#871

Post by pmarreck »

Ir0nMan wrote: post #866
N7lo4nl34akaoSN wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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>"artificial thought" How about Artificial Intelligence?

"intelligence" encompassing "thinking" then becomes the hangup.

I still say it needs a new name. If we want to be generous, we could state "the limit as time approaches infinity of thunking, is thinking." (I don't believe we will ever achieve astronomically-superior AGI, and certainly don't believe it will ever have a will of its own that someone else didn't give it- which just makes it a tool.)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#872

Post by anon291 »

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…

The simulation of a thing is not the thing itself because all equality lives in a hierarchy that is impossible to ignore when discussing equivalence.

Part of the issue is that our general concept of equality is limited by a first order classical logic which is a bad basis for logic

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#873

Post by nsagent »

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…

You might be interested in reading about the minimum description length (MDL) principle [1]. Despite all the dissenters to your argument, what your positing is quite similar to MDL. It's how you can fairly compare models (I did some research in this area for LLMs during my PhD).

Simply put, to compare models, you describe both the model and training data using a code (usual reported as number of bits). The trained model that represents the data within the fewest number of bits is the more powerful model.

This paper [2] from ICML 2021 shows a practical approach for attempting to estimate MDL for NLP models applied to text datasets.

[1]: http://www.modelselection.org/mdl/

[2]: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/perez21a.html

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#874

Post by burnte »

naasking wrote: post #860
burnte wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're just assuming that mimicry of a thing is not equivalent to the thing itself. I'm not assuming that, that's literally the definition of mimicry: to imitate closely. You might say I'm assuming that it is mimicking and not actually thinking, but there's no evidence it's actually thinking, and we know exactly what is IS doing because we created the code that we used to build the model. They're not thinking, it's…

> They're not thinking, it's doing math, mathematical transformations of data Whatever thinking fundamentally is, it also has an equivalence as a mathematical transformation of data. You're assuming the conclusion by saying that the two mathematical transformations of data are not isomorphic. A simulation of information processing is still information processing, just like running Windows in a QEMU VM is still runnin…

> Whatever thinking fundamentally is, it also has an equivalence as a mathematical transformation of data.

Do not confuse the mathematical description of physical processes as the world being made of math.

> You're assuming the conclusion by saying that the two mathematical transformations of data are not isomorphic.

Correct. They're not isomorphic. One is simple math that runs on electrified sand, and one is an unknown process that developed independently across a billion years. Nothing we're doing with AI today is even close to real thought. There are a billion trivial proofs that make the rounds as memes, like one R in strawberry, or being unable to count, etc.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#875

Post by nearbuy »

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".

> 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.

Seems like you have that backwards. If consciousness is from a nonphysical process, like a soul that's only given to humans, then it follows that you can't build consciousness with physical machines. If it's purely physical, it could be built.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#876

Post by emodendroket »

gkbrk wrote: post #584
emodendroket wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To borrow a line from Dijkstra, the claim seems a bit like saying that a submarine is swimming.

I think most people would agree that submarines are swimming.

I think the opposite. In fact I (and Dijstrka) thought that was so obvious I didn’t feel the need to elaborate on how obviously absurd it was.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#877

Post by emodendroket »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #518
emodendroket wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried in a while but at least previously you could completely flummox Gemini by asking it to come up with some plausible English words with no real known meaning; it just kept giving me rare and funny-sounding actual words and then eventually told me the task is impossible.

ChatGPT didn't have any issue when I recently asked something very similar. https://chatgpt.com/share/6909b7d2-20bc-8011-95b6-8a36f332ac...

Your link doesn’t work for me.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#878

Post by naasking »

burnte wrote: post #874
naasking wrote: post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not thinking, it's doing math, mathematical transformations of data Whatever thinking fundamentally is, it also has an equivalence as a mathematical transformation of data. You're assuming the conclusion by saying that the two mathematical transformations of data are not isomorphic. A simulation of information processing is still information processing, just like running Windows in a QEMU VM is still runnin…

> Whatever thinking fundamentally is, it also has an equivalence as a mathematical transformation of data. Do not confuse the mathematical description of physical processes as the world being made of math. > You're assuming the conclusion by saying that the two mathematical transformations of data are not isomorphic. Correct. They're not isomorphic. One is simple math that runs on electrified sand, and one is an unkn…

> Do not confuse the mathematical description of physical processes as the world being made of math.

Again, this doesn't apply to information. A simulation of a computation really is equivalent to that computation.

> One is simple math that runs on electrified sand, and one is an unknown process that developed independently across a billion years.

Right, so you admit that it's an unknown process, which means you literally cannot conclude that it is different to what LLMs are doing.

> There are a billion trivial proofs that make the rounds as memes, like one R in strawberry, or being unable to count, etc.

No, none of these are definitive proofs that they are not thinking. LLM "perceptions" are tokens, the strawberry question is basically asking it to figure out something that's below it's perceptual range. This has literally nothing to do with whether the way it processes information is or is not thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#879

Post by naasking »

satisfice wrote: post #407
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 think you are the one dismissing evidence. The valid chains of reasoning you speak of (assuming you are talking about text you see in a “thinking model” as it is preparing its answer) are narratives, not the actual reasoning that leads to the answer you get. I don’t know what LLMs are doing, but only a little experimentation with getting it to describe its own process shows that it CAN’T describe its own process. Y…

> The valid chains of reasoning you speak of (assuming you are talking about text you see in a “thinking model” as it is preparing its answer) are narratives, not the actual reasoning that leads to the answer you get.

It's funny that you think people don't also do that. We even have a term, "post hoc rationalization", and theories of mind suggest that our conscious control is a complete illusion, we just construct stories for decisions our subconscious has already made.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#880

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Thinking is great for this new type of tool - and we are learning that it’s separable from a need for “model welfare”..

Models are created and destroyed a billion times over - unlike humans who are individuals - so we need feel no guilt and have no qualms creating and destroying model instances to serve our needs.

But “a tool that can think” is a new concept that we will take a while to find its place in society.

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