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I love the idea of educating students on the math behind AI to demystify them. But I think it's a little weird to assert "AI is not magic and AI systems do not
by causal 10mo ago
I love the idea of educating students on the math behind AI to demystify them. But I think it's a little weird to assert "AI is not magic and AI systems do not think. It’s just maths." Equivalent statements could be made about how human brains are not magic, just biology - yet I think we still think.
- jvanderbot 10mo agoThinking is undefined so all statements about it are unverifiable.
- nh23423fefe 10mo agoIs this some self refuting sentence?
- random9749832 10mo agoIs reasoning undefined? That's what usually meant by "thinking".
- nutjob2 10mo agoFormal reasoning is defined, informal reasoning very much isn't.
- random9749832 10mo agoAt the end of the day most people would agree that if something is able to solve a problem without a lookup table / memorisation that it used reasoning to reach the answer. You are really just splitting hairs here.
- gowld 10mo agoWhat do "most" people thinking about LLMs, then? The "hair-splitting" underlies the whole GenAI debate.
- random9749832 10mo agoWe have widely used benchmarks for reasoning. And no no it does not, you need get off HN.
- CamperBob2 10mo agoThe difference between thinking and reasoning is that I can "think" that Elvis is still alive, Jewish space lasers are responsible for California wildfires, and Trump was re-elected president in 2020, but I cannot "reason" myself into those positions. It ties into another aspect of these perennial threads, where it is somehow OK for humans to engage in deluded or hallucinatory thought, but when an AI model does it, it proves they don't "think."
- d-lisp 10mo agoDo you think that thinking is undefinable ? If thinking is definable, then all statements about it aren't unverifiable.
- ablob 10mo agoCaveat: if thinking is definable, then not all statements about it are unverifiable.
- d-lisp 10mo agoYes, that's a problem of me not being a native english speaker. "All x aren't y" may mean "not all x are y" in my tongue. Not a single x is y is more what we would say in the previous case. But in our case we would say there are x that aren't y. If thinking is definable, it is wrong that all statements about it are unverifiable (i.e. there are statements about it that are verifiable.) Well, basic shit.
- terminalshort 10mo agoStatements like "it is bound by the laws of physics" are not "verifiable" by your definition, and yet we safely assume it is true of everything. Everything except the human brain, that is, for which wild speculation that it may be supernatural is seemingly considered rational discussion so long as it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe.
- jvanderbot 10mo agoTrue. You need to define "it" before you can verify physics bounds it. Unicorns are not bound by the laws of physics - because they do not exist.
- gowld 10mo ago> it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe. Is it only humans that have this need? That makes the need special, so humans are special in the universe.
- terminalshort 10mo agoIt is bound by the same laws of physics as everything else, so no, not special.
- sublinear 10mo agoI think what many are saying is that of all the things we know best, it's going to be the machines we build and their underlying principles. We don't fully understand how brains work, but we know brains don't function like a computer. Why would a computer be assumed to function like a brain in any way, even in part, without evidence and just hopes based on marketing? And I don't just mean consumer marketing, but marketing within academia as well. For example, names like "neural networks" have always been considered metaphorical at best.
- ben_w 10mo agoI would say a different problem: There's many definitions of "thinking". AI and brains can do some, AI and brains definitely provably cannot do others, some others are untestable at present, and nobody really knows enough about what human brains do to be able to tell if or when some existing or future AI can do whatever is needed for the stuff we find special about ourselves. A lot of people use different definitions, and respond to anyone pointing this out by denying the issue and claiming their own definition is the only sensible one and "obviously" everyone else (who isn't a weird pedant) uses it.
- jvanderbot 10mo agoThis is not a meta-question. The definition of "thinking" in any of the parent comments or TFA is actually not defined. Like literally no statements are made about what is being tested. So, if we had that we could actually discuss it. Otherwise it's just opinions about what a person believes thinking is, combined with what LLMs are doing + what the person believes they themselves do + what they believe others do. It's entirely subjective with very low SNR b/c of those confounding factors.
- BobaFloutist 10mo agoWhat's a definition of thinking that brains definitely provably can't do?
- _alternator_ 10mo agoComputing the Kolmorgorov constant?
- BobaFloutist 10mo agoI don't know that I agree that computation is a variety of thinking. It's certainly influenced by thinking, but I think of thinking as more the thing you do before, after, and in-between the computation, not the actual computation itself.
- ben_w 10mo ago
- ux266478 10mo agoIt's just provencial nonsense, there's no sound reasoning to it. Reductionism being taken and used as a form of refutation is a pretty common cargo culting behavior I've found. Overwhelmingly, I just don't think the majority of human beings have the mental toolset to work with ambiguous philosophical contexts. They'll still try though, and what you get out of that is a 4th order baudrillardian simulation of reason.
- bruntofsaurus 10mo ago"Just" is used here as a reductive device. You reduce others to a few sentences. Sentences constructed of words and representations of ideas defined long before you existed. I question whether you can work with ambiguous contexts as you have had the privilege of them being laid out in language for you already by the time you were born. From my reference frame you appear to merely be circumlocuting from memory, and become the argument you make about others.
- qsort 10mo agoI agree saying "they don't think" and leaving it at that isn't particularly useful or insightful, it's like saying "submarines don't swim" and refusing to elaborate further. It can be useful if you extend it to "they don't think like you do". Concepts like finite context windows, or the fact that the model is "frozen" and stateless, or the idea that you can transfer conversations between models are trivial if you know a bit about how LLMs work, but extremely baffling otherwise.
- gowld 10mo ago> Concepts like > finite context windows like a human has > or the fact that the model is "frozen" and stateless, much like a human adult. Models get updated at a slower frequency than humans. AI systems have access to fetch new information and store it for context. > or the idea that you can transfer conversations between models are trivial because computers are better-organized than humanity.
- isoprophlex 10mo ago> much like a human adult. I do hope you're able to remember what you had for lunch without incessantly repeating it to keep it in your context window
- whoknowsidont 10mo agoA lot of people genuinely can't remember what they did an hour ago, but to be very clear you're implying that an LLM can't "remember" something from an hour, or three hours ago, when it's the opposite. I can restart a conversation with an LLM 15 days later and the state is exactly as it was. Can't do that with a human. The idea that humans have a longer, more stable context window than LLM's, CAN or is even LIKELY to be true given certain activities but please let's be honest about this. If you talk to someone for an hour about a technical conversation I would guesstimate that 90% of humans would immediately start to lose track of details in about 10 minutes. So they write things down, or they mentally repeat things to themselves they know or have recognized they keep forgetting. I know this because it's happened continually in tech companies decade after decade. LLM's have already passed the Turing test. They continue to pass it. They fool and outsmart people day after day. I'm no fan of the hype AI is receiving, especially around overstating its impact in technical domains, but pretending that LLM's can't or don't consistently perform better than most human adults on a variety of different activities is complete non-sense.
- snickerbockers 10mo ago>Equivalent statements could be made about how human brains are not magic, just biology - yet I think we still think. They're not equivalent at all because the AI is by no means biological. "It's just maths" could maybe be applied to humans but this is backed entirely by supposition and would ultimately just be an assumption of its own conclusion - that human brains work on the same underlying principles as AI because it is assumed that they're based on the same underlying principles as AI.
- AlecSchueler 10mo ago> that human brains work on the same underlying principles as AI That wasn't the assumption though, it was only that human brains work by some "non-magical" electro-chemical process which could be described as a mechanism, whether that mechanism followed the same principles of AI or not.
- ikrenji 10mo agoHuman brains might not be explained by the same type of math AI is explained with, but it will be some kind of math...
- _lyxd 10mo agoThere's no reason to believe this to be the case. Godel says otherwise.
- gowld 10mo agoPlease explain, because this interpetation of "Godel" is highly nonstandard.
- _lyxd 10mo agoyou may consider reading I am a strange loop for that, which can do far better justification than myself if there's surely no algo to solve the halting problem, why would there be maths that describes consciousness?
- CamperBob2 10mo agoThat's where these threads always end up. Someone asserts, almost violently, that AI does not and/or cannot "think." When asked how to falsify their assertion, perhaps by explaining what exactly is unique about the human brain that cannot and/or will not be possible to emulate, that's the last anyone ever hears from them. At least until the next "AI can't think" story gets posted. The same arguments that appeared in 2015 inevitably get trotted out, almost verbatim, ten years later. It would be amusing on other sites, but it's just pathetic here.
- Terr_ 10mo agoSomeone asserts, almost religiously, that LLMs do and/or can "think." When asked how to falsify their assertion, perhaps by explaining what exactly is "thinking" in the human brain that can and/or will be possible to emulate...
- CamperBob2 10mo agoWhen asked how to falsify their assertion, perhaps by explaining what exactly is "thinking" in the human brain that can and/or will be possible to emulate... ... someone else points out that the same models that can't "think" are somehow turning in gold-level performance at international math and programming competitions, making Fields Medalists sit up and take notice, winning art competitions, composing music indistinguishable from human output, and making entire subreddits fail the Turing test.
- Terr_ 10mo agoA couple decades of chess programs nods knowingly: "First time?"
- CamperBob2 10mo agoA couple decades of chess programs nods knowingly: "First time?" Uh huh. Good luck getting Stockfish to do your math homework while Leela works on your next waifu. LLMs play chess poorly. Chess engines do nothing else at all. That's kind of a big difference, wouldn't you say?
- nutjob2 10mo agoAI systems compute and humans think. One is math and the other biology. But they are two different things with overlapping qualities. It's like MDMA and falling in love. They have many overlapping quantities but no one would claim one is the other.
- terminalshort 10mo agoI have yet to hear any plausible definition of "thought" that convincingly places LLMs and brains on opposite sides of it without being obviously contrived for that purpose.
- __loam 10mo agoWe don't know how brains work.
- mbg721 10mo agoWe really don't know how consciousness works. The popular theories that it's emergent might be proven correct, or might be proven to be like the idea that phlogiston built up in a vacuum, putting out flames.
- tracerbulletx 10mo agoYeah. This whole AI situation has really exposed how bad most people are at considering the ontological and semantic content of the words they use.
- whoknowsidont 10mo agoLot's of assumptions about humanity and how unique we are constantly get paraded in this conversation. Ironically, the people who tout those perspectives are the least likely to understand why we're really not all that "special" from a very factual and academic perspective. You'd think it would unlock certain concepts for this class of people, but ironically, they seem unable to digest the information and update their context.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- lisbbb 10mo agoA large number of adults I encounter are functionally illiterate, including business people in very high up positions. They are also almost 100% MATHEMATICALLY illiterate, not only unable to solve basic algebra and geometry problems, but completely unable to reason about statistical and probabilistic situations encountered in every day life. This is why gambling is so popular and why people are constantly fooled by politicians. It's bad enough to be without words in the modern world, but being without numbers makes you vulnerable to all manner of manipulations.
- sokka_h2otribe 10mo agoGambling exists more because of people dopamine systems than math...though I get the overall drift. People are fooled by politicians because ?? Also not really math related I think.
- omnicognate 10mo agoIndeed, people confidently assert as established fact things like "brains are bound by the laws of physics" and therefore "there can't be anything special" about them, so "consciousness is an illusion" and "the mind is a computer", all with absolute conviction but with very little understanding of what physics and maths really do and do not say about the universe. It's a quasi-religious faith in a thing not fully comprehended. I hope in the long run some humility in the face of reality will eventually be (re)learned.
- sounds 10mo agoA college level approach could look at the line between Math/Science/Physics and Philosophy. One thing from the article that stood out to me was that the introduction to their approach started with a problem about classifying a traffic light. Is it red or green? But the accompanying XY plot showed samples that overlapped or at least were ambiguous. I immediately lost a lot of my interest in their approach, because traffic lights by design are very clearly red, or green. There aren't mauve or taupe lights that the local populace laughs at and says, "yes, that's mostly red." I like the idea of studying math by using ML examples. I'm guessing this is a first step and future education will have better examples to learn from.
- krisoft 10mo ago> traffic lights by design are very clearly red, or green I suspect you feel this because you are observing the output of a very sophisticated image processing pipeline in your own head. When you are dealing with raw matrixes of rgb values it all becomes a lot more fuzzy. Especially when you encounter different illuminations, exposures and the cropping of the traffic light has noise on it. Not saying it is some intractably hard machine vision problem, because it is not. But there is some variety and fuzzyness there in the raw sensor measurements.
- bruntofsaurus 10mo agoDefine "think". We observe through our senses geometric relationships. Syntax is exactly that; letters, sentences, paragraphs organized in spatial/geometric relationships. At best thought is recreation of neural networks in the brain which only exist as spatial relationships. Our senses operate on spatial relationships; enough light to work by, and food relative to stomach to satisfy our biological impetus to survive (which is spatial relationships of biochemistry). The idea of "thought" as anything but biology makes little sense to me then as a root source is clearly observable. Humanity, roughly, repeats the same social story. All that thought does not seem to be all that useful as we end up in the same place; the majority as serfs of aristocracy. Personally would prefer less "thought" role-play and more people taking the load of the labor they exploit to enable them to sit and "think".
- cwmoore 10mo agoThe human mind is not just biology in the same way that LLMs are just math.
- smallerize 10mo agoThere's a huge amount of money going to convincing people that AI is magic or better than people. The reprogramming is necessary.