alt Hacker News>These machines do not think and they do not have a mind
Well, they do think, in that they produce output that is indistinguisable from thinking. If a person produced the same output to the same questions, we'd considered them thinking, maybe dumb sometimes, or paranoid at others, but still a thinking person.
We can argue about the quality and depth of the thinking that LLMs do (and we can say it's much cruder than a human thinking architecture, and of course not real time), but an LLM quacks like a thinking duck and looks like a thinking duck.
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bombcar • yesterday at 11:05 PM
That’s the problem - it seems like a mind but it doesn’t operate like the ones we’re used to.
Even a dog will learn from recent stimuli, these things don’t. The prompt just modifies.
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Indistinguishable output does not mean thinking occurred. It simply means you have the appearance of thinking. I believe thinking requires agency, which the LLM does not possess. As in, it has zero stakes.
It does not receive dopamine as a result for a good answer, and a split second after finishing your answer the very same GPU is probably translated french or something for someone in another state. This is a language generator which has a corpus of information and has been tuned to appear correct.