3 ms·

Even dumb humans are considered to have general intelligence. If the bar is having to outdo the median human, then 50% of humans don't have general intelligence

by nearbuy 7mo ago

Even dumb humans are considered to have general intelligence. If the bar is having to outdo the median human, then 50% of humans don't have general intelligence.

fc417fc802 7mo ago
Not true. We don't have a good definition for intelligence - it's very much an I'll know it when I see it sort of thing. Frontier models are reliably providing high undergraduate to low graduate level customized explanations of highly technical topics at this point. Yet I regularly catch them making errors that a human never would and which betray a fatal lack of any sort of mental model. What are we supposed to make of that? It's an exceedingly weird situation we find ourselves in. These models can provide useful assistance to literal mathematicians yet simultaneously show clear evidence of lacking some sort of reasoning the details of which I find difficult to articulate. They also can't learn on the job whatsoever. Is that intelligence? Probably. But is it general? I don't think so, at least not in the sense that "AGI" implies to me. Once humanity runs out of examples that reliably trip them up I'll agree that they're "general" to the same extent that humans are regardless of if we've figured out the secrets behind things such as cohesive world models, self awareness, active learning during operation, and theory of mind.
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  I think you are getting caught up on the intelligence part. That is the easy part since AGI doesn't have to be intelligent, it just has to be intelligence. If you look at early chess AI you will see that they are very weak compared to even a beginner human. The level of intelligence does not matter for a chess bot to be considered AI. It is that it is emulating intelligence that makes it AI. >But is it general? I don't think so I would consider it as general due to me being able to take any problem I can think of and the AI will make an attempt to solve it. Actually solving it is not a requirement for AGI. Being able to solve it just makes it smarter than an AGI that can't. You can trip up chess AI, but that don't stop them from being AI. So why apply that standard to AGI?
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    How am I getting caught up on it? I acknowledged that I think frontier models qualify as intelligent but disputed the "general" part. In fact for quite a few years now there have been many non-frontier models that I also consider intelligent within a very narrow domain. I think stockfish reasonably qualifies as superhuman AI but not even remotely "general". Similarly alphafold. > Actually solving it is not a requirement for AGI. I think I see what you're trying to get at but taken as worded that can't possibly be right. Otherwise a dumb-as-a-brick automaton that made an "attempt" to tackle whatever you put in front of it would qualify as AGI.
    - charcircuit 7mo ago
      >Otherwise a dumb-as-a-brick automaton that made an "attempt" to tackle whatever you put in front of it would qualify as AGI. I would agree as long as there is a general mechanism to represent problems. It is AGI, but would perform poorly on benchmarks compared to better AGI.
- LordDragonfang 7mo ago
  > Yet I regularly catch them making errors that a human never would I have yet to see a "error" that modern frontier models make that I could not imagine a human making - average humans are way more error prone than the kind of person who posts here thinks, because the social sorting effects of intelligence are so strong you almost never actually interact with people more than a half standard deviation away. (The one exception is errors in spatial reasoning with things humans are intimately familiar with - for example, clothing - because LLMs live in literary space, not physics space, and only know about these things secondhand) > and which betray a fatal lack of any sort of mental model. This has not been a remotely credible claim for at least the past six months, and it seemed obviously untrue for probably a year before then. They clearly do have a mental model of things, it's just not one that maps cleanly to the model of a human who lives in 3D space. In fact, their model of how humans interact is so good that you forget that you're talking to something that has to infer rather than intuit how the physical world works, and then attribute failures of that model to not having one.
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    > you almost never actually interact with people more than a half standard deviation away I wasn't talking about the average person there but rather those who could also craft the high undergrad to low grad level explanations I referred to. > This has not been a remotely credible claim for at least the past six months Well it's happened to me within the past six months (actually within the past month) so I don't know what you want from me. I wasn't claiming that they never exhibit evidence of a mental model (can't prove a negative anyhow). There are cases where they have rendered a detailed explanation to me yet there were issues with it that you simply could not make if you had a working mental model of the subject that matched the level of the explanation provided (IMO obviously). Imagine a toddler spewing a quantum mechanics textbook at you but then uttering something completely absurd that reveals an inherent lack of understanding; not a minor slip up but a fundamental lack of comprehension. Like I said it's really weird and I'm not sure what to make of it nor how to properly articulate the details. I'm aware it's not a rigorous claim. I have no idea how you'd go about characterizing the phenomenon.
    - 7mo ago
- nearbuy 7mo ago
  > Not true. It's certainly true. By definition. If the bar for general intelligence is being smarter than the median human, 50% of people won't reach the threshold for general intelligence. (And if the bar is beating the median in every cognitive test, then a much smaller fraction of people would qualify.) People don't have a consistent definition of AGI, and the definitions have changed over the past couple years, but I think most people have settled on it meaning at least as smart as humans in every cognitive area. But that has to be compared to dumb people, not median. We don't want to say that regular people don't have general intelligence.
  - tadfisher 7mo ago
    You are using terms like "smart" and "dumb" as if they have universally-accepted definitions. You can make up as many definitions of intelligence as you like (I would argue that is a sign of intelligence) but using those terms is certainly going to lead to circular reasoning.
    - nearbuy 7mo ago
      It has nothing to do with circular reasoning or my personal opinions. You can choose to define general intelligence in a way that excludes regular people if you like, but then you'd be using a weird definition that differs from how 99.9% of people define it. Humans have general intelligence by any common definition.
      - fc417fc802 7mo ago
        Defining it that way doesn't exclude ordinary people. That's an erroneous claim on your part. Humans as a class exhibit certain capabilities. Thus we expect a class of algorithm to either roughly meet or exceed those capabilities across the board in order to be considered "general". It is clear that we have not yet achieved that.
        nearbuy 7mo ago
        First, what is your definition exactly? That it must be better than the median human intelligence? You're trying to define a term in a way that's completely detached from how anyone uses it. If we discover an alien race with an IQ of 95, people aren't going to say they don't have general intelligence. We haven't defined an exact cutoff for what counts as general intelligence, but it has to include regular people with an IQ in the 70s that don't have a serious mental disability. If an AI can do every single cognitive task as well as a stupid person, it would have to qualify as having general intelligence if the stupid person qualified. It doesn't matter if the AI beats the median person 0% of the time, as long as it beats someone who is considered to have general intelligence at the task.

by nearbuy 7mo ago

Even dumb humans are considered to have general intelligence. If the bar is having to outdo the median human, then 50% of humans don't have general intelligence.

fc417fc802 7mo ago

Not true. We don't have a good definition for intelligence - it's very much an I'll know it when I see it sort of thing. Frontier models are reliably providing high undergraduate to low graduate level customized explanations of highly technical topics at this point. Yet I regularly catch them making errors that a human never would and which betray a fatal lack of any sort of mental model. What are we supposed to make of that? It's an exceedingly weird situation we find ourselves in. These models can provide useful assistance to literal mathematicians yet simultaneously show clear evidence of lacking some sort of reasoning the details of which I find difficult to articulate. They also can't learn on the job whatsoever. Is that intelligence? Probably. But is it general? I don't think so, at least not in the sense that "AGI" implies to me. Once humanity runs out of examples that reliably trip them up I'll agree that they're "general" to the same extent that humans are regardless of if we've figured out the secrets behind things such as cohesive world models, self awareness, active learning during operation, and theory of mind.

charcircuit 7mo ago
I think you are getting caught up on the intelligence part. That is the easy part since AGI doesn't have to be intelligent, it just has to be intelligence. If you look at early chess AI you will see that they are very weak compared to even a beginner human. The level of intelligence does not matter for a chess bot to be considered AI. It is that it is emulating intelligence that makes it AI. >But is it general? I don't think so I would consider it as general due to me being able to take any problem I can think of and the AI will make an attempt to solve it. Actually solving it is not a requirement for AGI. Being able to solve it just makes it smarter than an AGI that can't. You can trip up chess AI, but that don't stop them from being AI. So why apply that standard to AGI?
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  How am I getting caught up on it? I acknowledged that I think frontier models qualify as intelligent but disputed the "general" part. In fact for quite a few years now there have been many non-frontier models that I also consider intelligent within a very narrow domain. I think stockfish reasonably qualifies as superhuman AI but not even remotely "general". Similarly alphafold. > Actually solving it is not a requirement for AGI. I think I see what you're trying to get at but taken as worded that can't possibly be right. Otherwise a dumb-as-a-brick automaton that made an "attempt" to tackle whatever you put in front of it would qualify as AGI.
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    >Otherwise a dumb-as-a-brick automaton that made an "attempt" to tackle whatever you put in front of it would qualify as AGI. I would agree as long as there is a general mechanism to represent problems. It is AGI, but would perform poorly on benchmarks compared to better AGI.
LordDragonfang 7mo ago
> Yet I regularly catch them making errors that a human never would I have yet to see a "error" that modern frontier models make that I could not imagine a human making - average humans are way more error prone than the kind of person who posts here thinks, because the social sorting effects of intelligence are so strong you almost never actually interact with people more than a half standard deviation away. (The one exception is errors in spatial reasoning with things humans are intimately familiar with - for example, clothing - because LLMs live in literary space, not physics space, and only know about these things secondhand) > and which betray a fatal lack of any sort of mental model. This has not been a remotely credible claim for at least the past six months, and it seemed obviously untrue for probably a year before then. They clearly do have a mental model of things, it's just not one that maps cleanly to the model of a human who lives in 3D space. In fact, their model of how humans interact is so good that you forget that you're talking to something that has to infer rather than intuit how the physical world works, and then attribute failures of that model to not having one.
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  > you almost never actually interact with people more than a half standard deviation away I wasn't talking about the average person there but rather those who could also craft the high undergrad to low grad level explanations I referred to. > This has not been a remotely credible claim for at least the past six months Well it's happened to me within the past six months (actually within the past month) so I don't know what you want from me. I wasn't claiming that they never exhibit evidence of a mental model (can't prove a negative anyhow). There are cases where they have rendered a detailed explanation to me yet there were issues with it that you simply could not make if you had a working mental model of the subject that matched the level of the explanation provided (IMO obviously). Imagine a toddler spewing a quantum mechanics textbook at you but then uttering something completely absurd that reveals an inherent lack of understanding; not a minor slip up but a fundamental lack of comprehension. Like I said it's really weird and I'm not sure what to make of it nor how to properly articulate the details. I'm aware it's not a rigorous claim. I have no idea how you'd go about characterizing the phenomenon.
  - 7mo ago
nearbuy 7mo ago
> Not true. It's certainly true. By definition. If the bar for general intelligence is being smarter than the median human, 50% of people won't reach the threshold for general intelligence. (And if the bar is beating the median in every cognitive test, then a much smaller fraction of people would qualify.) People don't have a consistent definition of AGI, and the definitions have changed over the past couple years, but I think most people have settled on it meaning at least as smart as humans in every cognitive area. But that has to be compared to dumb people, not median. We don't want to say that regular people don't have general intelligence.
- tadfisher 7mo ago
  You are using terms like "smart" and "dumb" as if they have universally-accepted definitions. You can make up as many definitions of intelligence as you like (I would argue that is a sign of intelligence) but using those terms is certainly going to lead to circular reasoning.
  - nearbuy 7mo ago
    It has nothing to do with circular reasoning or my personal opinions. You can choose to define general intelligence in a way that excludes regular people if you like, but then you'd be using a weird definition that differs from how 99.9% of people define it. Humans have general intelligence by any common definition.
    - fc417fc802 7mo ago
      Defining it that way doesn't exclude ordinary people. That's an erroneous claim on your part. Humans as a class exhibit certain capabilities. Thus we expect a class of algorithm to either roughly meet or exceed those capabilities across the board in order to be considered "general". It is clear that we have not yet achieved that.
      - nearbuy 7mo ago
        First, what is your definition exactly? That it must be better than the median human intelligence? You're trying to define a term in a way that's completely detached from how anyone uses it. If we discover an alien race with an IQ of 95, people aren't going to say they don't have general intelligence. We haven't defined an exact cutoff for what counts as general intelligence, but it has to include regular people with an IQ in the 70s that don't have a serious mental disability. If an AI can do every single cognitive task as well as a stupid person, it would have to qualify as having general intelligence if the stupid person qualified. It doesn't matter if the AI beats the median person 0% of the time, as long as it beats someone who is considered to have general intelligence at the task.