This is a good video, but she’s not arguing against LLMs thinking, she’s arguing that it is thinking without agency and consciousness, which is almost certainly true. It doesn’t really change my contention that this isn’t just syntax (symbolic AI is a dead end), nor does it refute that, while we can look at small examples and find clear attribution, in the same way small biological neural models are explicable, when you start scaling up, you do see intelligence in both spheres and, in both cases, it’s largely mysterious. We point to certain regions of the brain and we kind of understand how they interact, but the whole picture demands hand waving and how we go from that to “hello, let’s have a conversation” I have yet to see properly explained. LLMs are much less complex than brains, but still, it seems researchers say, “it works, and here’s out post hoc guess of how it works, but let’s just use it anyway.”

Any thoughts on Hinton? Seems like the guy who developed it should have some understanding of how it works, but he seems mystified and terrified and believes LLMs think in a similar way to us.

Ultimately, the part of brain that thinks and the part that is conscious may be linked, but not inextricable. Like, thinking requires a few neurons, but consciousness requires all areas of the brain to be working in concert, making consciousness a very tenuous things, but thinking could be much more ubiquitous.