[MyOutfitIsVague]

> Everyone is out here acting like "predicting the next thing" is somehow fundamentally irrelevant to "human thinking" and it is simply not the case.

Nobody is. What people are doing is claiming that "predicting the next thing" does not define the entirety of human thinking, and something that is ONLY predicting the next thing is not, fundamentally, thinking.

[visarga]

Well, yes because thinking soon requires interacting, not just ideating. It's in the dialogue between ideation and interaction that we make our discoveries.

[jampekka]

LLMs can interact with the world via e.g. function calling.

[agumonkey]

when LLM popped out and people started to say 'this is just markov chain on steroid and not thinking' i was a bit confused because a lot of my "thinking" is statistical too.. I very often try to solve an issue by switching a known solution with a different "probable" variant of it (tweaking a parameter)

LLMs have higher dimensions (they map token to grammatical and semantical space) .. it might not be thinking but it seems on its way we're just thinking with more abstractions before producing speech ?... dunno

[akoboldfrying]

I claim that all of thinking can be reduced to predicting the next thing. Predicting the next thing = thinking in the same way that reading and writing strings of bytes is a universal interface, or every computation can be done by a Turing machine.

[suddenlybananas]

People can claim whatever they like. That doesn't mean it's a good or reasonable hypothesis (especially for one that is essentially unfalsifible like predictive coding).

[d1sxeyes]

The problem is that we don’t have a good understanding of what “thinking” really is, and those parts of it we think we do understand involve simple things done at scale (electrical pulses on specific pathways, etc).

It is not unreasonable to suspect differences between humans and LLMs are differences in degree, rather than category.

[akoboldfrying]

I'm not trying to advance a testable hypothesis. If you think the unfalsifiability of my claim is a problem, you haven't understood what I'm trying to do.

My claim is that the two concepts are indistinguishable, thus equivalent. The unfalsifiability is what makes it a natural equivalence, the same as in the other examples I gave.

[lostmsu]

IMHO, you should. The opponent does not have an alternative definition of thinking that would have a prediction power matching the token prediction. Whatever they are thinking thinking is is a strictly worse scientific theory.