alt Hacker News>Indistinguishable output does not mean thinking occurred.
It does for all intents and purposes. The rest is semantics and metaphysics.
That how we know another person is thinking too. By their output. We don't put a debugger into their brain.
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> The rest is semantics and metaphysics.
It's really just all mathematics and physics. There's no metaphysical anything about LLMs or how they do what they do. It's all just a bunch of fancy math "behind the curtain". An LLM can actually explain a lot of how it works "under the hood" if you ask it just the right questions in just the right ways. ;)
We actually can and do have a way to investigate brain activity in humans. Allow me to introduce you to the Electroencephalogram.
When there’s no activity we declare them brain dead.
What then is your LLM "thinking" about between answers? The answer is nothing. Your definition of thinking does not match the one humans normally use.
>That how we know another person is thinking too. By their output. We don't put a debugger into their brain.
We know thoughts exist in their brain between the ones they choose to verbalize. Avoiding the distraction of solipsism.
For the LLM the "thinking" phase is just a preamble output for creating the answer. It just gets appended to the context window. Remove the context windows from your models and you will see how much of a mind they truly have. None.