Ask HN: What are the goal posts for whether AI is smarter than us? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the goal posts for whether AI is smarter than us?

2 pointseldritch_4ier3 comments

I ask because it seems like these are shifting in real time. The internet as an entity certainly contains more knowledge for any human, but it is plainly an aggregator so it doesn't seem right to say "it" is smarter. On the other hand, ChatGPT is an individual entity that is obviously more knowledgeable than any human. It gets things wrong all the time, and can't do everything humans can do (yet), but if you knew a human as creative and broadly knowledgable, you'd probably call them above average intelligence at least (aka smarter than the average human).

What are the goal posts we can agree on and why doesn't ChatGPT already qualify as "smarter than humans"?

Once upon a time, agi used to mean artificial and generally intelligent (which we have passed). Then it meant on par with human experts at most/all tasks and now it seems to mean better than all human experts combined. at this point, why not stop this farce and replace the G there with Godlike.

People will always move the posts to arbitrary destinations. it's been happening for a long time now and it doesn't look to be stopping. We'll almost certainly build asi before people are willing to call it agi.

I don't think the goal of "intelligence" has ever been about reading as many books as you can, or even writing the most profound speech the fastest. We hold language in this high regard because it's seen as the pinnacle of human expression, but really it's another exploitable set of patterns that is easily grokked by machines.

So, I don't think there is a goalpost. It's like racing Nascar against a team of track runners, the results wouldn't add up to any meaningful comparison.

A bulldozer is stronger than a human at certain tasks. Deep Blue played chess better than Gary Kasparov. IBM Watson played Jeopardy better than Ken Jennings.

People have always moved the goalposts for artificial intelligence as technology has gotten better.

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