[barnacs]

To me, it's about motivation.

Intelligent living beings have natural, evolutionary inputs as motivation underlying every rational thought. A biological reward system in the brain, a desire to avoid pain, hunger, boredom and sadness, seek to satisfy physiological needs, socialize, self-actualize, etc. These are the fundamental forces that drive us, even if the rational processes are capable of suppressing or delaying them to some degree.

In contrast, machine learning models have a loss function or reward system purely constructed by humans to achieve a specific goal. They have no intrinsic motivations, feelings or goals. They are statistical models that approximate some mathematical function provided by humans.

[chpatrick]

Are any of those required for thinking?

[barnacs]

In my view, absolutely yes. Thinking is a means to an end. It's about acting upon these motivations by abstracting, recollecting past experiences, planning, exploring, innovating. Without any motivation, there is nothing novel about the process. It really is just statistical approximation, "learning" at best, but definitely not "thinking".

[chpatrick]

Again the problem is that what "thinking" is totally vague. To me if I can ask a computer a difficult question it hasn't seen before and it can give a correct answer, it's thinking. I don't need it to have a full and colorful human life to do that.

[barnacs]

But it's only able to answer the question because it has been trained on all text in existence written by humans, precisely with the purpose to mimic human language use. It is the humans that produced the training data and then provided feedback in the form of reinforcement that did all the "thinking".

Even if it can extrapolate to some degree (altough that's where "hallucinations" tend to become obvious), it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety".

[chpatrick]

Humans are also trained on data made by humans.

> it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety".

That's creativity which is a different question from thinking.

[bluefirebrand]

> Humans are also trained on data made by humans

Humans invent new data, humans observe things and create new data. That's where all the stuff the LLMs are trained on came from.

> That's creativity which is a different question from thinking

It's not really though. The process is the same or similar enough don't you think?

[barnacs]

I guess our definition of "thinking" is just very different.

Yes, humans are also capable of learning in a similar fashion and imitating, even extrapolating from a learned function. But I wouldn't call that intelligent, thinking behavior, even if performed by a human.

But no human would ever perform like that, without trying to intuitively understand the motivations of the humans they learned from, and naturally intermingling the performance with their own motivations.