Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#901

Post by scarmig »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #893

I've written a full response to Somers' piece: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking: What The New Yorker Missed: https://emusings.substack.com/p/the-case-that-ai-is-thinking... The core argument: When you apply the same techniques (transformers, gradient descent, next-token prediction) to domains other than language, they fail to produce anything resembling "understanding." Vision had a 50+ year head start but LLMs leapfro…

The core objection I'd have to your argument: humans also don't have privileged access to the territory. Neurons don't have some metaphysical super power that let them reach into the True Reality; all there are are maps encoded in our neural circuitry by learning rules that evolution has developed because those learned maps lead to greater reproductive success. If direct access to reality is what's needed, then it's true that machines are incapable of thinking; but then so are humans.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#902

Post by heyjamesknight »

embedding-shape wrote: post #865
deadbabe wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t understand. If humans had no words to describe a duck, they would still know what a duck is . Without words, LLMs would have no way to map an encounter with a duck to anything useful.

Which makes sense for text LLMs yes, but what about LLMs that deal with images? How can you tell they wouldn't work without words? It just happens to be words we use for interfacing with them, because it's easy for us to understand, but internally they might be conceptualizing things in a multitude of ways.

Multimodal models aren't really multimodal. The images are mapped to words and then the words are expanded upon by a single mode LLM.

If you didn't know the word "duck", you could still see the duck, hunt the duck, use the ducks feather's for your bedding and eat the duck's meat. You would know it could fly and swim without having to know what either of those actions were called.

The LLM "sees" a thing, identifies it as a "duck", and then depends on a single modal LLM to tell it anything about ducks.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#903

Post by ojosilva »

spragl wrote: post #639
ivraatiems wrote: post #18

The author searches for a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans," but to me it seems almost trivially true that both are possible. What I mean by that is that I think there is a good chance that LLMs are similar to a subsystem of human thinking. They are great at pattern recognition and prediction, which is a huge part of cognition. What they are not is conscious, or…

This is how I see LLMs as well. The main problem with the article is that it is meandering around in ill-conceived concepts, like thinking, smart, intelligence, understanding... Even AI. What they mean to the author is not what they mean to me, and still different to they mean to the other readers. There are all these comments from different people throughout the article, all having their own thoughts on those concep…

I think the consensus in the future will be that LLMs were, after all, stochastic parrots.

The difference with what we think today is that in the future we'll have a new definition of stochastic parrots, a recognition that stochastic parrots can actually be very convincing and extremely useful, and that they exhibit intelligence-like capabilities that seemed unattainable by any technology up to that point, but LLMs were not a "way forward" for attaining AGI. They will plateau as far as AGI metrics go. These metrics keep advancing to stay ahead of LLM, like a Achilles and the Turtle. But LLMs will keep improving as tooling around it becomes more sophisticated and integrated, and architecture evolves.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#904

Post by pennomi »

naasking wrote: post #789
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…

> 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 move. What’s really needed is an analysis of what thinking actually means, as a word. Unfortunately everyone is loathe to argue about definitions, even when that is fundamentally what this is all about. This exact argument applies to "free will", and that definition has been…

The problem with adding definitions to words like “thinking” and “free will” is that doing so means humans can no longer pretend they are special.

Even in this thread, the number of people claiming some mystical power separating humans from all the rest of nature is quite noticeable.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#905

Post by oxag3n »

> ...like a Joycean inner monologue or the flow of sense memories in a Proustian daydream. Or we might mean reasoning: working through a problem step by step.

Moving goalposts will be mostly associated with AI I think: God -> ASI -> AGI -> inner monologue -> working through a problem step by step.

Why fixating on a single human trait like thinking? The only reason trillions are "invested" into this technology is building a replacement for knowledge workers at scale. We can extend this line of thought and make another article "AI has knowledge", at least in a distilled sense, it knows something, sometimes. Cargo cult...

It's very easy to define what's actually required - a system that can show up in a knowledge worker's environment, join the video call, greet the team and tell about itself, what it learned, and start learning in a vague environment, pull those invisible lines of knowledge that lie between its colleagues, getting better, collaborating, and finally replacing all of them.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#906

Post by Libidinalecon »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #706
pmarreck wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems to be a semantics argument. We don't have a name for a thing that is "useful in many of the same ways 'thinking' is, except not actually consciously thinking" I propose calling it "thunking"

I don't like it for a permanent solution, but "synthetic thought" might make a good enough placeholder until we figure this out. It feels most important to differentiate because I believe some parties have a personal interest in purposely confusing human thought with whatever LLMs are doing right now.

This is complete nonsense.

If you do math in your head or math with a pencil/paper or math with a pocket calculator or with a spreadsheet or in a programming language, it is all the same thing.

The only difference with LLMs is the anthropomorphization of the tool.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#907

Post by Libidinalecon »

slightwinder wrote: post #586
simulator5g wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having seen photocopiers so many times produce coherent, sensible, and valid chains of words on a page, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking.

Photocopiers are the opposite of thinking. What goes in, goes out, no transformation or creating of new data at all. Any change is just an accident, or an artifact of the technical process.

It is the wrong category error.

The proper category error in the context of the discussion would be to say the photocopier is drawing a picture.

It doesn't matter how well or not the photocopier recreates an image. To say the photocopier is drawing a picture is just nonsense and has no meaning.

The same category error as to say the LLM is "thinking".

Of course, the category error could be well exploited for marketing purposes if you are in the business of selling photocopiers or language models.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#908

Post by lmganon »

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…

Is this model thinking too?

https://huggingface.co/PantheonUnbound/Satyr-V0.1-4B

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#909

Post by fennecbutt »

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…

Thinking as in capable of using basic reasoning and forming chains of logic and action sequences for sure. Ofc we both understand that neither of us are trying to say we think it can think in the human sense at this point in time.

But oh boy have I also seen models come up with stupendously dumb and funny shit as well.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#910

Post by supern0va »

ffwd wrote: post #173
nrclark wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one possible counter-argument: can you say for sure how your brain is creating those replacement words? When you replace tree with rainbow, does rainbow come to mind because of an unconscious neural mapping between both words and "forest"? It's entirely possible that our brains are complex pattern matchers, not all that different than an LLM.

That's a good point and I agree. I'm not a neuroscientist but from what I understand the brain has an associative memory so most likely those patterns we create are associatively connected in the brain. But I think there is a difference between having an associative memory, and having the capacity to _traverse_ that memory in working memory (conscious thinking). While any particular short sequence of thoughts will be…

>I can for example iterate on the sequence in my initial post and make it novel by writing down more and more disparate concepts and deleting the concepts that are closely associated. This will in the end create a more novel sequence that is not associated in my brain I think.

This seems like something that LLMs can do pretty easily via CoT.

As a fun test, I asked ChatGPT to reflexively given me four random words that are not connected to each other without thinking. It provided: lantern, pistachio, orbit, thimble

I then asked it to think carefully about whether there were any hidden relations between them, and to make any changes or substitutions to improve the randomness.

The result: fjord, xylophone, quasar, baklava

Post reply on HN