[kenjackson]

This is really over indexing on language for LLMs. It’s about taking input and generating output. Humans use different types of senses as their input, LLMs use text.

What makes thinking an interesting form of output is that it processes the input in some non-trivial way to be able to do an assortment of different tasks. But that’s it. There may be other forms of intelligence that have other “senses” who deem our ability to only use physical senses as somehow making us incomplete beings.

[jhedwards]

Sure, but my whole point is that humans are _not_ passive input/output systems, we have an active biological system that uses an input/output system as a tool for coordinating with the environment. Thinking is part of the active system, and serves as an input to the language apparatus, and my point is that there is no corollary for that when talking about LLMs.

[kenjackson]

The environment is a place where inputs exist and where outputs go. Coordination of the environment in real time is something that LLMs don’t do much of today although I’d argue that the web search they know perform is the first step.

[pixl97]

LLMs use tokens. Tokens don't have to be text, hence multimodal AI. Fee free to call them different senses if you want.