"The question [whether computers can think] is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, 24 November 1983

I don't agree with the parallel. Submarines can move through water - whether you call that swimming or not isn't an interesting question, and doesn't illuminate the function of a submarine.

With thinking or reasoning, there's not really a precise definition of what it is, but we nevertheless know that currently LLMs and machines more generally can't reproduce many of the human behaviours that we refer to as thinking.

The question of what tasks machines can currently accomplish is certainly meaningful, if not urgent, and the reason LLMs are getting so much attention now is that they're accomplishing tasks that machines previously couldn't do.

To some extent there might always remain a question about whether we call what the machine is doing "thinking" - but that's the uninteresting verbal question. To get at the meaningful questions we might need a more precise or higher resolution map of what we mean by thinking, but the crucial element is what functions a machine can perform, what tasks it can accomplish, and whether we call that "thinking" or not doesn't seem important.

Maybe that was even Dijkstra's point, but it's hard to tell without context...

And the often missed caveat is that we should only care about whether the software does what it is supposed to do.

Under that light, LLMs are just buggy and have been for years. Where is the LLM that does what it says it should do? "Hallucination" and "do they reason" are distractions. They fail. They're buggy.

But the topic here is whether some techniques are progressive or not

(with a curious parallel about whether some paths in thought are dead-ends - the unproductive focus mentioned in the article).

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