6 ms·

I think the bigger issue is people confusing impressive but comparatively simpler achievements (everything current LLMs do) with anything remotely near the cogn

• mikepurvis 1y ago
  But the big crisis right now is that for an astonishing number of tasks that a normal person could come up with, chatgpt.com is actually a good at or better than a typical human. If you took the current state of affairs back to the 90s you’d quickly convince most people that we’re there. Given that we’re actually not, we’re now have to come up with new goalposts.
  • p1esk 1y ago
    Exactly. Five years ago I posted here on HN that AI will pass Turing Test in the next 3 years (I was impressed by Facebook chatbot progress at the time). I was laughed at and downvoted into oblivion. TT was seen by many as a huge milestone, incredibly difficult task, “maybe in my lifetime” possibility.
    • photonthug 1y ago
      Turing test isn't actually a good test of much, but even so, we're not there yet. Anyone that thinks we've passed it already should experiment a bit a with counter-factuals. Ask your favorite SOTA model to assume something absurd and then draw the next logical conclusions based on that. "Green is yellow and yellow is green. What color is a banana?" They may get the first question(s) right, but will trip up within a few exchanges. Might be a new question, but often they are very happy to just completely contradict their own previous answers. You could argue that this is hitting alignment and guard-rails against misinformation.. but whatever the cause, it's a clear sign it's a machine and look, no em-dashes. Ironically it's also a failure of the turing test that arises from a failure in reasoning at a really basic level, which I would not have expected. Makes you wonder about the secret sauce for winning IMO competitions. Anyway, unlike other linguistic puzzles that attempt to baffle with ambiguous reference or similar, simple counterfactuals with something like colors are particular interesting because they would NOT trip up most ESL students or 3-5 year olds.
      • rmunn 1y ago
        I've seen one blog where in order to comment, you have to answer the question "What color is a green orange?" I presume he gets spambots which all answer "orange" and get blocked from commenting, or more commonly which leave that input blank (since it's a non-standard input field) and also get blocked. But it just occurred to me that you could ask "what color is a green eggplant?" for a similar result. Though you'd catch a lot of people who, like me before I looked up fruits that aren't green when unripe, assume that all unripe fruits are green. (They aren't, unripe eggplants are white and look like eggs, hence the name).
        • p1esk 1y ago
          Me: What color is a green eggplant? ChatGPT: A green eggplant (also called Thai eggplant or green brinjal, depending on the variety) is actually green on the outside — sometimes solid green, sometimes streaked with white or pale green. The inside flesh is typically off-white or light cream, just like purple eggplants. If you mean a green-colored variety (not an unripe purple one), then the skin color can range from pale mint green to deep jade, often with light striping. Me: How would an average human answer this question? ChatGPT: An average person would probably answer something simple and direct like: “It’s green.” Or if they’re being a bit more specific: “It’s green on the outside and white inside.” Most people wouldn’t overthink the variety or mention Thai vs. unripe types — they’d just describe what they see.
          • photonthug 1y ago
            Outcome would depend on the rest of the test, but I'd say the "human" version of this answer adds zero or negative value to chances of being human, on grounds of strict compliance, sycophancy, and/or omniscience. "No such thing" would probably be a very popular answer. Elaboration would probably take the form of "love it" or "hate it", instead of reaching for a comprehensive answer describing the inside and the outside. Experimental design comes in here and the one TT paper mentioned in this thread has instructions for people like "persuade the interrogator [you] are human". Answering that a green eggplant is green feels like humans trying to answer questions correctly and quickly, being wary of a trap. We don't know participants background knowledge but anyone that's used ChatGPT would know that ignoring the question and maybe telling an eggplant-related anecdote was a better strategy
  • acdha 1y ago
    > chatgpt.com is actually a good at or better than a typical human. It can appear so, as long as you don’t check too carefully. It’s impressive but still very common to find basic errors once you are out of the simplest, most common problems due to the lack of real understanding or reasoning capabilities. That leads to mistakes which most humans wouldn’t make (while sober / non-sleep deprived) and the classes of error are different because humans don’t mix that lack of understanding/reasoning/memory with the same level of polish.
    • hattmall 1y ago
      Ask ChatGPT about something you don't know about and it can appear very smart. Ask it in depth about something you are very knowledgeable about and the ignorance will quickly become apparent.
  • cauliflower2718 1y ago
    I think this depends on how you measure task. One common kind of interaction I have with chatgpt (pro): 1. I ask for something 2. Chatgpt suggests something that doesn't actually fulfill my request 3. I tell it how its suggestion does not satisfy my request. 4. It gives me the same suggestion as before, or a similar suggestion with the same issue. Chatgpt is pretty bad at "don't keep doing the thing I literally just asked you not to do" but most humans are pretty good at that, assuming they are reasonable and cooperative.
    • garciasn 1y ago
      While the majority of humans are quite capable of this, there are so many examples anyone could give that prove that capability doesn’t mean they do so.
    • jjmarr 1y ago
      > Chatgpt is pretty bad at "don't keep doing the thing I literally just asked you not to do" but most humans are pretty good at that. Most humans are terrible at that. Most humans don't study for tests, fail, and don't see the connection. Most humans will ignore rules for their safety and get injured. Most humans, when given a task at work, will half-ass it and not make progress without constant monitoring. If you only hang out with genius SWEs in San Francisco, sure, ChatGPT isn't at AGI. But the typical person has been surpassed by ChatGPT already. I'd go so far as to say the typical programmer has been surpassed by AI.
      • throw4847285 1y ago
        It does feel that one of the most common arguments for AI is misanthropy. That isn't a rational claim, it's a personal bias.
      • cauliflower2718 1y ago
        My example is asking for way less than what you're asking for. Here is something I do not see with reasonable humans who are cooperative: Me: "hey friend with whom I have plans to get dinner, what are you thinking of eating?" Friend: "fried chicken?" Me: "I'm vegetarian" Friend: "steak?" Note that this is in the context of four turns of a single conversation. I don't expect people to remember stuff across conversations or to change their habits or personalities. Your goalpost is much further out there.
  • notatoad 1y ago
    it should be possible to admit that AGI not only a long way off, but also a lot different to what chatGPT does, without discounting that chatGPT is extraordinarily useful. the AI bros like to talk about AGI as if it's just the next threshold for LLMs, which discounts the complexity of AGI, but also discounts their own products. we don't need an AGI to be our helpful chatbot assistant. it's fine for that to just be a helpful chatbot assistant.
    • habinero 1y ago
      Honestly, a lot of it seems like it's lazy narcissism. They don't think other people have value or intelligence, therefore this machine that bullshits well has to be equally useful.
  • jdlshore 1y ago
    > for an astonishing number of tasks that a normal person could come up with, chatgpt.com is actually a good at or better than a typical human. That’s not my experience at all. Unless you define “typical human” as “someone who is untrained in the task at hand and is satisfied with mediocre results.” What tasks are you thinking of? (And, to be clear, being better than that straw man of “typical human” is such a low bar as to be useless.)
  • spicyusername 1y ago
    chatgpt.com is actually a good at or better than a typical human. I really don't think it is on basically any measure outside of text regurgitation. It can aggregate an incredible amount of information, yes, and it can do so very quickly, but it does so in an incredibly lossy way and that is basically all it can do. It does what it was designed to do, predict text. Does it do that incredibly well, yes. Does it do anything else, no. That isn't to say super advanced text regurgitation isn't valuable, just that its nowhere even remotely close to AGI.
    • throwaway-0001 1y ago
      I feel every human just regurgitates words too. And most are worse than an AI. I have countless examples of lawyers, hr and other public gov bodies that breach the law without knowing the consequences. I also have examples of AI giving bad advice, but it’s al better than an average human right now. An AI could easily save them a ton of money in the fees they are paying for breaching the law.
      • habinero 1y ago
        > I feel every human just regurgitates words too. And most are worse than an AI That's not a fact, that's just cynicism mixed with sociopathy. I hear this argument a lot from AI bros, and...y'all don't know how much you're telling on yourselves.
        • throwaway-0001 1y ago
          This is from my experience, I didn’t do any study. What you said is not a fact either. And so?
          • hitarpetar 1y ago
            And so? one of you is making positive claims without evidence and the other isn't
            • 1y ago
  • georgefrowny 1y ago
    > If you took the current state of affairs back to the 90s you’d quickly convince most people that we’re there. This is an interesting ambiguity in the Turing test. It does not say if the examiner is familiar with the expected level of the candidate. But I think it's an unfair advantage to the machine if it can pass based on the examiner's incredulity. If you took a digital calculator back to the 1800s, added a 30 second delay and asked the examiner to decide if a human was providing the answer to the screen or a machine, they might well conclude that it must be human as there is no known way for a machine to perform that action. The Akinator game would probably pass the test into the 1980s. I think the only sensible interpretation of the test is one where the examiner is willing to believe that a machine could be providing a passing set of answers before the test starts. Otherwise the test difficulty varies wildly based on the examiners impression of the current technical capabilities of machines.
  • noduerme 1y ago
    I don't know. People in the 90s were initially fooled by Eliza, but soon understood that Eliza was a trick. LLMs are a more complex and expensive trick. Maybe it's time to overthrow the Turing Test. Fooling humans isn't necessarily an indicator of intelligence, and it leads down a blind alley: Language is a false proxy for thought. Consider this. I could walk into a club in Vegas, throw down $10,000 cash for a VIP table, and start throwing around $100 bills. Would that make most people think I'm wealthy? Yes. Am I actually wealthy? No. But clearly the test is the wrong test. All show and no go.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • andoando 1y ago
        This just isnt true. Go head and make up a problem and ask
      • noduerme 1y ago
        >> I should be able to get one up and running for you by the middle of next year Funny. I agree with your plainspoken analysis of why these things are nowhere near AGI, and of what AGI would be. I even had a long conversation with Claude last week where it told me that no LLM would ever approach AGI (but then it wrote a 4-paragraph-long diatribe entitled "Why I Declare Myself Conscious" in the same conversation). These neural networks are closer to the speechwriting machine in The Penultimate Truth, or the songwriting machine in 1984. As for that latter one, I believe Orwell remarks on how it just recycles the same sentimental tunes and words in different order so that there's always a "new" song all the proles are humming.
    • qudat 1y ago
      > LLMs are a more complex and expensive trick The more I think about this, the more I think the same is true for our own intelligence. Consciousness is a trick and AI development is lifting the veil of our vanity. I'm not claiming that LLMs are conscious or intelligent or whatever. I'm suggesting that next token prediction has scaled so well and cover so many use cases that the next couple breakthroughs will show us how simple intelligence is once you remove the complexity of biological systems from the equation. https://bower.sh/who-will-understand-consciousness https://bower.sh/who-will-understand-consciousness
  • z0r 1y ago
    It's good at tasks if you have a competent and _critical_ human editor selecting outputs and pulling the prompt slot lever again as needed.
  • runarberg 1y ago
    I am unimpressed, and I don‘t think there is any crisis (other then the lack of consumer protection around these products, copyright, and the amount of energy it takes running these system during a global warming crisis). If you look at a calculator you will quickly find it is much better then a human in any of the operations that have been programmed into the calculator, and has been since the 1960s. Since the 1960s the operations programmed into your average calculator has increased by several orders of magnitude. The digital calculator sure is impressive, and useful, but there is no crisis. Even in the world outside computing, a bicycle can outperform an human runner easily, yet there is no mobility crisis as a result. ChatGPT is very good at predicting language. And in quite a few subject matters it may be better than your average human in predicting said language. But not nearly as good as a car is to a runner, nor even as good as a chess computer is to a grand master. But if you compare ChatGPT to an expert in the subject, the expert is much much much better then the language model. In these tasks a calculator is much more impressive.
  • Yizahi 1y ago
    The problem is for a majority of those tasks people conveniently "forget" the actual start and end of the process. LLMs can't start most of those tasks by it's own decision and neither they can't end and evaluate the result of those tasks. Sure, we got automated multiple tasks from a very low percentage to a very high percentage, and that is really impressive. But I don't see how any LLM can bridge that gap from very percent of automation to a strict 100% of automation, for any task. And if a program requires a real intelligence handling and controlling it, is it really AI?
  • deleted 1y ago
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• hyperadvanced 1y ago
  Was thinking about this today. I had to do a simple wedding planning task - setting up my wedding website with FAQ, cobbling the guest list (together from texts, photos of my father’s address book, and excel spreadsheets), directions and advice for lodging, conjuring up a scheme to get people to use the on-site cabins, and a few other mundane tasks. No phone calls, no “deep research” just wrote browser-jockeying. Not even any code, the off-the-rack system just makes that for you (however I know for a fact an LLM would love to try to code this for me). I know without a single doubt that I could not simply as an “AI” “agent” to do this today and expect any sort of a functional result, especially when some of these were (very simple) judgement calls or workarounds for absolutely filthy data and a janky wedding planning website UI.
• thinmalk 1y ago
  The tests for AGI that keep getting made, including the ones in this paper, always feel like they're (probably unintentionally) constructed in a way that covers up AI's lack of cognitive versatility. AI functions much better when you do something like you see here, where you break down tasks into small restricted benchmarks and then see if they can perform well. But when we say AGI, we want something that will function in the real world like a human would. We want to be able to say, "Here's 500 dollars. Take the car to get the materials, then build me a doghouse, then train my dog. Then go to the store, get the ingredients, and make dinner." If the robotics aren't reliable enough to test that, then have it be a remote employee for 6 months. Not "have someone call up AI to wrote sections of code" - have a group of remote employees, make 10% AI, give them all the same jobs with the same responsibilities, and see if anyone notices a difference after 6 months. Give an AI an account on Upwork, and tell it to make money any way it can. Of course, AI is nowhere near that level yet. So we're stuck manufacturing toy "AGI" benchmarks that current AI can at least have some success with. But these types of benchmarks only broadcast the fact that we know that current and near future AI would fail horribly at any actual AGI task we threw at it.