6 ms·
The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use
by duxup 1y ago
The terminology is so confusing in AI right now.
I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them.
Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms.
I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoThe question is what's different in your own "thinking?"
- pennomi 1y agoIf you actually know the answer to this, you should probably publish a paper on it. The conditions that truly create intelligence is… not well understood.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoThat's actually the point I was making. There's an assumption that the LLM is working differently because there's a statistical model but we lack the understanding of our own intelligence to be able to say this is indeed a difference.
- freejazz 1y agoSo? There is no more evidence to suggest they are the same than what you've already rejected here as evidencing difference.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoI know but I didn't claim they were the same, I simply questioned the position that they were different. The fact is we don't know, so it seems like a poor basis for building off of
- freejazz 1y agoYeah, going either way. Let it not be mentioned at all, imo.
- munksbeer 1y agoTo me a more interesting observation, one that is already discussed a lot, is that if eventually we cannot tell the difference between a machine and a human in terms of output, then when do we accept that "thinking" has subjective, rather than objective?
- jhedwards 1y agoThinking in humans is prior to language. The language apparatus is embedded in a living organism which has a biological state that produces thoughts and feelings, goals and desires. Language is then used to communicate these underlying things, which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).
- jsdalton 1y agoAgreed. Many animals without language show evidence of thinking (e.g. complex problem solving skills and tool use). Language is clearly an enabler of complex thought in humans but not the entire basis of our intelligence, as it is with LLMs.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoBut having language as the basis doesn't mean it isn't intelligence, right? At least I see no argument for that in what's being said. Stability can come from a basis of steel but it can also have a basis of wood.
- jibal 1y agoLLMs have no intelligence or problem solving skills and don't use tools. What they do is statistically pattern match a prompt against a vast set of tokenized utterances by humans, who do have intelligence and complex problem solving skills. If the LLM's training data were the writings of a billion monkeys banging on typewriters, any appearance of intelligence and problem solving skills would disappear.
- cma 1y ago> which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things). Its possible something like this could be said of the middle transformer layers where it gets more and more abstract, and modern models are multimodal as well through various techniques.
- kenjackson 1y ago
- chasil 1y agoThe platform that we each hold is the most powerful abstract analysis machine known to exist. It may be, by the end of my life, that this will no longer be true. That would be poignant.
- rollcat 1y agoAsk a crow, or a parrot. (Really intelligent animals, by the way!)
- zahlman 1y agoI don't need to be able to qualify it. It's clearly different. I must believe this to function, because otherwise there is no reason to do anything, to make any decision - in turn because there is no justification to believe that I am actually "making decisions" in any meaningful sense. It boils down to belief in free will.
- munksbeer 1y agoYou should read "What's Expected Of Us" by Ted Chiang. Or perhaps you already have. It explores exactly this concept. For what it's worth, I don't believe we have what people would call free will. Our brains operate either in an entirely deterministic universe, in which case everything was decided and your choices are not in any sense free, or we're in a universe with intrinsic randomness, and randomness doesn't make free will either. I'm aware of the philosophy of Compatibilism, but this is just a sleight of hand to keep believing in some undefinable concept of free will.
- globnomulous 1y agoThis is why I used to fight this "shorthand" whenever I encountered it. The shorthand almost always stops being shorthand and becomes the speaker or author's actual beliefs regarding the systems. Disciplined, careful use of language matters. But I'm so crestfallen and pessimistic about the future of software and software engineering now that I have stopped fighting that battle.
- s900mhz 1y agoI personally love LLMs and use them daily for a variety of tasks. I really do not know how to “fix” the terminology. I agree with you that they are not thinking in the abstract like humans. I also do not know what else you would call “chain-of-thought”. Perhaps “journaling-before-answering” lol. It’s basically talking out loud to itself. (Is that still being too anthropomorphic?) Is this comment me “thinking out loud”? shrug
- jibal 1y agoChain of thought is what LLMs report to be their internal process--but they have no access to their internal process ... their reports are confabulation, and a study by Anthropic showed how far they are from actual internal processes.
- mdaniel 1y agoI wanted to fight the "hallucinating" versus "confabulating" delineation but was told "it's a term of art, sit back down"
- baq 1y agoState of the art is such they’re constantly hallucinating new terms for old concepts. Language evolves, but we should guide it. Instead they just pick up whatever sticks and run with it.
- browningstreet 1y agoThese word choices are about impact and in-group buy-in. They're prescriptive cult-iness, not descriptive communication.
- dmos62 1y agoWould it be thinking if the brain was modeled in a more "accurate" way? Does this set of criteria for thinkingness come from whether or not the underlying machinery resembles what the corresponding machinery in humans looks like under the hood? I'm putting the word accurate in quotes, because we'd have to understand how the brain in humans works, to have a measure for accuracy, which is very much not the case, in my humble opinion, contrary to what many of the commenters here imply.
- duxup 1y agoIMO it would depend on what it is actually doing. Right now the fact that it just string words together without knowing the meaning is painfully obvious when it fails. I'll ask a simple question and get a "Yes" back and then it lists all the reasons that indicate the answer is very clearly "No." But it is clear that the LLM doesn't "know" what it is saying.
- dmos62 1y agoMy definition of thinking tends towards functionality rather than mechanics too. I would summarize my experience with LLMs by saying that they think, but a bit differently, for some definition of "a bit".
- stronglikedan 1y agoThank Feynman for those wonky terms. Now everyone acts like their target audience is a bunch of six year olds.
- MetaWhirledPeas 1y agoHow do you plan to convey this information to laymen in everyday conversations?
- weatherlite 1y agoThinking ...you're simply moving some chains of neurons right?
- spacemadness 1y agoOr saying they’re close to AGI because LLM behavior is indistinguishable from thinking to them. Especially here on HN I see “what’s the difference?” arguments all the time. It looks like it to me so it must be it. QED.
- iainctduncan 1y agoor rather "while I have never studied psychology, cognition, or philosophy, I can see no difference, so clearly they are thinking!" makes the baby jesus cry
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zahlman 1y agoI haven't meaningfully studied those things either (i.e. beyond occasionally looking some things up out of curiousity - and for that matter, I've often come across the practice of philosophy in the wild and walked away thinking 'what a lot of vacuous rubbish') and yet the differences are so clear to me that I keep wondering how others can fail to discern them.
- more_corn 1y agoHaving studied those things I can say that from their perspective “what’s the difference?” is an entirely legitimate question. Boldly asserting that what LLMS do is not cognition is even worse than asserting that it is. (If you dig deep into how they do what they do we find functional differences, but the outcome are equivalent) The butlerian view is actually a great place to start. He asserts that when we solve a problem through thinking and then express that solution in a machine we’re building a thinking machine. Because it’s an expression of our thought. Take for example the problem of a crow trying to drink from a bottle with a small neck. The crow can’t reach the water. It figures out that pebbles in the bottle raise the level so it drops pebbles till it can reach the water. That’s thinking. It’s non-human thinking, but I think we can all agree. Now express that same thought (use a non water displacement factor to raise the water to a level where it can do something useful) Any machine that does that expresses the cognition behind the solution to that particular problem. That might be a “one shot” machine. Butler argues that as we surround ourselves with those one shot machines we become enslaved to them because we can’t go about our lives without them. We are willing partners in that servitude but slaves because we see to the care and feeding of our machine masters, we reproduce them, we maintain them, we power them. His definition of thinking is quite specific. And any machine that expresses the solution to a problem is expressing a thought. Now what if you had a machine that could generalize and issue solutions to many problems? Might that be a useful tool? Might it be so generally useful that we’d come to depend on it? From the Butlerian perspective our LLMS are already AGI. Namely I can go to Claude and ask for the solution to pretty much any problem I face and get a reasonable answer. In many cases better than I could have done alone. So perhaps if we sat down with a double blind test LLMs are already ASI. (AI that exceeds the capability of normal humans)
- baq 1y agoI can write or speak to a computer and it understands most of the time. It can even answer some questions correctly, much more so if given material to search in without being very specific. That’s… new. If it’s just a magic trick, it’s a damn good one. It was hard sci-fi 3 years ago.
- geraneum 1y agoHow did you get your questions answered prior to this?
- baq 1y agoIrrelevant
- geraneum 1y agoUnderstanding the relevance of this will help you see beyond the hype and marketing.
- baq 1y agoDo not assume.
- geraneum 1y agoI don't even need to.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agoWhat is the relevance from your perspective?
- butlike 1y agoNot irrelevant. LLMs are just prosaic Google. if the pages of google were written in language as opposed to a list.
- 1y ago
- Terr_ 1y agoSometimes we anthropomorphize complex systems and it's not really a problem, like how water "tries" to flow downhill, or the printer "wants" cyan ink. It's how we signal there's sufficient complexity (or unknowns) that can be ignored or deferred. The problem arises when we apply this intuition to things where too many people in the audience might take it literally.
- MetaWhirledPeas 1y agoWell the solution certainly isn't, "Let's wait for the bot to finish stringing words together with math before we decide our itinerary."
- mlmonge 1y agoEven worse, IMHO... Are those who argue that LLMs an become sentient--I've seen this banter in other threads here on HN, in fact. As far as I understand it, sentience is a property organic to beings that can do more than just reason. These beings can contemplate on their existence, courageously seek & genuinely value relationship and worship their creator. And yes, I'm describing HUMANS. In spite of all the science fiction that wondrously describes otherwise, machines/programs will not ever evolve to develop humanity. Am I right? I'll get off my soapbox now... just a pet peeve that I had to vent once again on the heels of said "literal anthropomorphosists"
- Terr_ 1y agoAt this point I've seen various folks declare they've "bootstrapped consciousness" etc., somehow providing a sacred spark through just the right philosophical words or a series of pseudo-mathematical inputs. I believe it's fundamentally the same as the people convinced "[he/she/it] really loves me." In both cases they've shaped the document-generation so that it describes a fictional character they want to believe is is real. Just with an extra dash of Promethean delusions of grandeur.
- the_af 1y agoI don't believe LLMs have become sentient, nor can it "contemplate on its existence". That said, I find some of your claims less compelling. I'm an atheist, so there's no "creator" for humans to be worshipped. But also, human intelligence/sentience came from non-intelligence/non-sentience, right? So something appeared where before it didn't exist (gradually, and with whatever convoluted and random accidents, but it did happen: something new where it didn't exist before). Therefore, it's not implausible that a new form of intelligence/sentience could be fast tracked again out of non-intelligence, especially if humans were directing its evolution. By the way, not all scifi argues that machines/programs can evolve to develop humanity. Some scifi argues the contrary, and good scifi wonders "what makes us human?".
- ufmace 1y agoI've tended to agree with this line of argument, but on the other hand... I expect that anybody you asked 10 years ago who was at least decently knowledgeable about tech and AI would have agreed that the Turing Test is a pretty decent way to determine if we have a "real" AI, that's actually "thinking" and is on the road to AGI etc. Well, the current generation of LLMs blow away that Turing Test. So, what now? Were we all full of it before? Is there a new test to determine if something is "really" AI?
- SnowflakeOnIce 1y ago> Well, the current generation of LLMs blow away that Turing Test Maybe a weak version of Turing's test? Passing the stronger one (from Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence") involves an "average interrogator" being unable to distinguish between human and computer after 5 minutes of questioning more than 70% of the time. I've not seen this result published with today's LLMs.
- ufmace 1y agoI'll admit that I was not familiar with the strong version of it. But I am still surprised that nobody has done that. Has nobody even seriously attempted to see how LLMS do at that? Now I might just have to check for myself. I would have presumed it would be a cake walk. Depending of course on exactly how we define "average interrogator". I would think if we gave a LLM enough pre-prepping to pretend it was a human, and the interrogator was not particularly familiar with ways of "jailbreaking" LLMs, they could pass the test.
- Marsymars 1y ago“Enough pre-prepping” does a lot of heavy lifting there.
- ufmace 1y agoNow that I have a little more time to search around, I easily found this study, published March 31st this year, so not quite 3 months ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 I only skimmed it, but I don't see anything clearly wrong about it. According to their results, GPT-4.5 with what they term a "persona" prompt does in fact pass a standard that seems to me at least a little harder than what you said - actively picks the AI as the human, which seems stricter to me than being "unable to distinguish". It is a little surprising to me that only that one LLM actually "passed" their test, versus several others performing somewhat worse. Though it's also not clear exactly how long ago the actual tests were done - this stuff moves super fast.
- _ea1k 1y agoThat's what humans are doing most of the time, just without the math part.
- beloch 1y agoWelcome to the struggle physicists have faced since the development of quantum physics. Words take on specific mathematical and physical meanings within the jargon of the field and are used very precisely there, but lead to utterly unhinged new-age BS when taken out of context (e.g. "What the Bleep do we know?" [1]) You need to be very aware of your audience and careful about the words you use. Unfortunately, some of them will be taken out of context. [1]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399877/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399877/
- the_af 1y ago> I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms. I think it still is, but it works way better than it has any right to, or that we would expect from the description "string words together with math". So it's easy to understand people's confusion.