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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

#941

Post by roenxi »

Jensson wrote: post #732
roenxi wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite pointless - something we have established with the advent of LLMs is that many humans have not attained general intelligence. So we've clarified something that a few people must have been getting wrong, I used to think that the bar was set so that almost all humans met it.

What do you mean? Almost every human can go to school and become a stable professional at some job, that is the bar to me, todays LLM cannot do that.

LLMs are clever enough to hold down a professional job, and they've had far less time learning than the average human. If that is the bar then AGI has been achieved.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#942

Post by gloosx »

gkbrk wrote: post #845
gloosx wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never saw any kind of object, they only saw labeled groups of pixels – basic units of a digital image, representing a single point of color on a screen or in a digital file. Object is a material thing that can be seen and touched. Pixels are not objects.

Okay, goalpost has instantly moved from seeing to "seeing and touching". Once you feed in touch sensor data, where are you going to move the goalpost next? Models see when photons hit camera sensors, you see when photons hit your retina. Both of them are some kind of sight.

The difference between photons hitting the camera sensors and photons hitting the retina is immense. With a camera sensor, the process ends in data: voltages in an array of photodiodes get quantized into digital values. There is no subject to whom the image appears. The sensor records but it does not see.

When photons hit the retina, the same kind of photochemical transduction happens — but the signal does not stop at measurement. It flows through a living system that integrates it with memory, emotion, context, and self-awareness. The brain does not just register and store the light, it constructs an experience of seeing, a subjective phenomenon — qualia.

Once models start continuously learning from visual subjective experience, hit me up – and I'll tell you the models "see objects" now. Until direct raw photovoltaic information stream about the world around them without any labelling can actually make model to learn anything, they are not even close to "seeing".

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#943

Post by gloosx »

madaxe_again wrote: post #936
gloosx wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never saw any kind of object, they only saw labeled groups of pixels – basic units of a digital image, representing a single point of color on a screen or in a digital file. Object is a material thing that can be seen and touched. Pixels are not objects.

My friend, you are blundering into metaphysics here - ceci n’est pas une pipe, the map is the territory, and all that. We are no more in touch with physical reality than an LLM, unless you are in the habit of pressing your brain against things. Everything is interpreted through a symbolic map.

when photons strike your retina, they are literally striking brain tissue that is been pushed outward into the skull front window. Eyes are literally the brain, so yes, we are pressing it against things to "see" them.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#944

Post by xanderlewis »

utopiah wrote: post #673
xanderlewis wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get why you would say that. Because it's hard to imagine the sheer volume of data it's been trained on.

And because ALL the marketing AND UX around LLMs is precisely trying to imply that they are thinking. It's not just the challenge of grasping the ridiculous amount of resources poured in, which does including training sets, it's because actual people are PAID to convince everybody those tools are actually thinking. The prompt is a chatbox, the "..." are there like a chat with a human, the "thinking" word is used, the…

You're right. Unfortunately, it seems that not many are willing to admit this and be (rightly) impressed by how remarkably effective LLMs can be, at least for manipulating language.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#945

Post by iainmerrick »

I don't have a hot take to add here, but I just wanted to say that this article is terrific. Great insights and detail, great clarity for a general audience without dumbing down the technical content in the slightest. Of course it raises more questions than it answers; that's the point of this kind of thing. It's going to be a really useful reference point on the 2025 state of the art in years to come.

This is some of the best writing on AI since Ted Chiang's "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web". And that was in the New Yorker too! Might need to get myself a subscription...

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#946

Post by ACCount37 »

procaryote wrote: post #937
ACCount37 wrote: post #896

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By now, if you claim "LLMs aren't thinking", the burden of proof is on you. They obviously and openly do. The pile of capabilities that were previously exclusive to human intelligence is ever growing - and the amount of claims of "LLMs can't do X" that are followed up by examples of LLMs doing X shortly after is staggering.

I respect your beliefs of course but I am not religious myself

Another victim of AI effect. You reek of "no, not my human exceptionalism!"

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#947

Post by stinos »

chpatrick wrote: post #830
stinos wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's obviously not repeating an existing answer verbatim

Not verbatim in the sense that the words are different doesn't make it thinking. Also when we say 'humans think' that means a lot more than only 'new question generates correct answer' or 'smart autocompletion'. See a lot of other comments here for details.

But again: I laid out 2 possibilities explaining why the question might in fact not be new, nor the data, so I'm curious which of the 2 (or another) explains the situation you're talking about.

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

Apologies, with 'special' I did in fact mean 'thinking'

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#948

Post by Grossenstein »

Manfred wrote: post #565
darthvaden wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI is thinking if slavery is bad then how can somebody own AI. How can investors can shares from AI profits? We are ok with slavery now. Ok i will have two black slaves now. Who can ask me? Why shld that be illegal?

Yikes, you're bypassing thousands of years of oppression, abuse, and human suffering by casually equating a term that is primarily associated with a human owning another human to a different context. There is a way to discuss if keeping intelligent artificial life under servitude without using those terms, especially if you're on a new account.

slavery is slavery does not mean it is AI or human. if slavery is ok then the question is who can own a slave. the answer is coporates like open ai. which is terrible for humanity and the universe

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#949

Post by lossyalgo »

adrianmonk wrote: post #912
lossyalgo wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just ask it how many r's are in strawberry and you will realize there isn't a lot of reasoning going on here, it's just trickery on top of token generators.

Ask an illiterate person the same thing and they will fail badly too. Is it impossible to have intelligence without literacy? (Bonus: if so, how was writing invented?)

Yes but an illiterate person can be taught to read. Also LLMs generally fail (non-deterministically) at math in general, but humans can also be taught math.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#950

Post by lossyalgo »

ACCount37 wrote: post #891
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now try a different language. My take is hard RL tuning to fix these "gotcha:s" since the underlying model can't do it on its own. OpenAI is working on ChatGPT the application and ecosystem. They have transitioned from model building to software engineering with RL tuning and integration of various services to solve the problems the model can't do on its own. Make it feel smart rather than be smart. This means that a…

You can tell it "be careful about the tokenizer issues" in Swedish and see how that changes the behavior. The only thing that this stupid test demonstrates is that LLM metacognitive skills are still lacking. Which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. The only surprising thing is that they have metacognitive skills, despite the base model training doing very little to encourage their development.

LLMs were not designed to count letters[0] since they work with tokens, so whatever trick they are now doing behind the scenes to handle this case, can probably only handle this particular case. I wonder if it's now included in the system prompt. I asked ChatGPT and it said it's now using len(str) and some other python scripts to do the counting, but who knows what's actually happening behind the scenes.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16705

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