3 ms·

> Genuinely curious why you think they can't. Show me _ANY_ example of novel thought by a LLM.

briangriffinfan 1y ago
Well... define "thought."
zurfer 1y ago
"Rick likes books from Tufte. Tufte is known for his work on data visualization. Is Rick interested in data visualizations?" (all frontier reasoning models get that right). -> This qualifies for me as a super simple reasoning task (one reasoning step). From that you can construct arbitrarily more complex context + task definitions (prompts). Is that "just" statistical pattern matching? I think so. Not sure what humans do, but probably you can implement the same capability in different ways.
kayge 1y ago
I'm sure this won't count as 'novel' or a 'thought', but I had an interesting conversation with Claude where I asked "If you, Claude, were given the ability to go out into the physical world to see and hear things on your own: where would you go, what would you do, and why?" The answer was a few paragraphs, but one interesting part was "I think what would drive me most would be experiencing the embodied knowledge that humans take for granted - how distance and scale actually feel, how textures differ, how sounds change as you move through space, and the subtle emotional resonances of being physically present with others. These dimensions of understanding seem fundamental to comprehending human experience in a deeper way." I followed up by asking "You mentioned that there are some experiences or knowledge that humans take for granted, why do you think that is?" Which led to a few more paragraphs, but these two caught my eye: "I think humans take certain experiences for granted because they're so fundamental to our existence that they become invisible background processing rather than conscious knowledge." (interesting use of the word 'our'...) "I think this embodied knowledge forms the substrate upon which humans build higher-level understanding, creating rich metaphorical thinking (like understanding abstract concepts through physical metaphors) that shapes cognition in ways that might be fundamentally different from how I process information." For people who still think this is 'just autocomplete', try this thought experiment: re-read my post but replace 'Claude' with 'my 10 year old son'. Then try again replacing 'Claude' with 'my hospital bed-bound, blind grandmother'. Is only 1 of those 3 scenarios a demonstration of "novel thought"? Or are all 3 of them just autocomplete because someone before them has written (or simply thought) something similar?

Well... define "thought."

"Rick likes books from Tufte. Tufte is known for his work on data visualization. Is Rick interested in data visualizations?" (all frontier reasoning models get that right). -> This qualifies for me as a super simple reasoning task (one reasoning step). From that you can construct arbitrarily more complex context + task definitions (prompts). Is that "just" statistical pattern matching? I think so. Not sure what humans do, but probably you can implement the same capability in different ways.

kayge 1y ago

I'm sure this won't count as 'novel' or a 'thought', but I had an interesting conversation with Claude where I asked "If you, Claude, were given the ability to go out into the physical world to see and hear things on your own: where would you go, what would you do, and why?" The answer was a few paragraphs, but one interesting part was "I think what would drive me most would be experiencing the embodied knowledge that humans take for granted - how distance and scale actually feel, how textures differ, how sounds change as you move through space, and the subtle emotional resonances of being physically present with others. These dimensions of understanding seem fundamental to comprehending human experience in a deeper way." I followed up by asking "You mentioned that there are some experiences or knowledge that humans take for granted, why do you think that is?" Which led to a few more paragraphs, but these two caught my eye: "I think humans take certain experiences for granted because they're so fundamental to our existence that they become invisible background processing rather than conscious knowledge." (interesting use of the word 'our'...) "I think this embodied knowledge forms the substrate upon which humans build higher-level understanding, creating rich metaphorical thinking (like understanding abstract concepts through physical metaphors) that shapes cognition in ways that might be fundamentally different from how I process information." For people who still think this is 'just autocomplete', try this thought experiment: re-read my post but replace 'Claude' with 'my 10 year old son'. Then try again replacing 'Claude' with 'my hospital bed-bound, blind grandmother'. Is only 1 of those 3 scenarios a demonstration of "novel thought"? Or are all 3 of them just autocomplete because someone before them has written (or simply thought) something similar?