When it Comes to AI: Think Inside the Box

James Somers recently published an interesting essay in _The New Yorker_ titled“The Case That A.I. Is Thinking.”He starts by presenting a specific definition of thinking, attributed in part to Eric B. Baum’s 2003 book _What is Thought?_, that describes this act as deploying a “compressed model of the world” to make predictions about what you expect to happen. (Jeff Hawkins’s 2004 exercise in amateur neuroscience,_On Intelligence_, makes a similar case).

Somers then talks to experts who study how modern large language models operate, and notes that the mechanics of LLMs’ next-token prediction resemble this existing definition of thinking. Somers is careful to constrain his conclusions, but…