Connectionists: Can LLMs think?

[Thomas Nowotny]

Hi Paul and Gary,
I think I am firmly in your camp & well summarised. However, there is this nagging doubt about how much of the human intelligence we attribute to each other and ourselves are the same “little strings and hidden compartments” and “how we just redirected the audience’s attention” that undoubtedly underlie LLMs abilities.
Best,
Thomas Nowotny

From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of Gary Marcus
Sent: 20 March 2023 08:01
To: Paul Cisek <paul.cisek at umontreal.ca>
Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Connectionists: Can LLMs think?

bravo!


On Mar 20, 2023, at 07:55, Paul Cisek <paul.cisek at umontreal.ca<mailto:paul.cisek at umontreal.ca>> wrote:

I must say that I’m somewhat dismayed when I read these kinds of discussions, here or elsewhere. Sure, it’s understandable that many people are fooled into thinking that LLMs are intelligent, just like many people were fooled by Eliza and Eugene Goostman. Humans are predisposed into ascribing intention and purpose to events in the world, which helped them construct complex societies by (often correctly) interpreting the actions of other people around them. But this same predisposition also led them to believe that the volcano was angry when it erupted because they did something to offend the gods. Given how susceptible humans are to this false ascription of agency, it is not surprising that they get fooled when something acts in a complex way.

But (most of) the people on this list know what’s under the hood! We know that LLMs are very good at pattern matching and completion, we know about the universal approximation theorem, we know that there is a lot of structure in the pattern of human-written text, and we know that humans are predisposed to ascribe meaning and intention even where there are none. We should therefore not be surprised that LLMs can produce text patterns that generalize well within-distribution but not so well out-of-distribution, and that when the former happens, people may be fooled into thinking they are speaking with a thinking being. Again, they were fooled by Eliza, and Eugene Goostman, and the Heider-Simmel illusion (ascribing emotion to animated triangles and circles)… and the rumblings of volcanos. But we know how LLMs and volcanos do what they do, and can explain their behavior without any additional assumptions (of thinking, or sentience, or whatever). So why add them?

In a sense, we are like a bunch of professional magicians, who know where all of the little strings and hidden compartments are, and who know how we just redirected the audience’s attention to slip the card into our pocket… but then we are standing around backstage wondering: “Maybe there really is magic?”

I think it’s not that machines have passed the Turing Test, but rather that we failed it.

Paul Cisek


From: Rothganger, Fredrick <frothga at sandia.gov<mailto:frothga at sandia.gov>>
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2023 11:39 AM
To: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Connectionists: Can LLMs think?

Noting the examples that have come up on this list over the last week, it's interesting that it takes some of the most brilliant AI researchers in the world to devise questions that break LLMs. Chatbots have always been able to fool some people some of the time, ever since ELIZA. But we now have systems that can fool a lot of people a lot of the time, and even the occasional expert who loses their perspective and comes to believe the system is sentient. LLMs have either already passed the classic Turning test, or are about to in the next generation.

What does that mean exactly? Turing's expectation was that "the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted". The ongoing discussion here is an indication that we are approaching that threshold. For the average person, we've probably already passed it.

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