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No AI has ever passed a Turing Test. Is AI very impressive and can it do a lot of things that people used to imagine it would only be able to do once it became generally intelligent? Yes. But has anyone actually conducted a test where they were unable to distinguish between an AI and a human being? No. This never happend and therefore the Turing Test hasn't been passed.
The entire point of the Turing Test is that, rather than try to define general intelligence as the ability to do specific things that we can test for, we define it in such a way that passing it means we know the AI can do any cognitive task that a human can do, whatever that might be, without trying to guess ahead of time what that is. We don't try to guess the most difficult things for AI to do and say it has general intelligence when it can do them, or else we end up making the mistake that you and many others are making where we have AI that can do very well in coding competitions but cannot do the job of a low level programmer or it can get high marks on a test measuring Ph.D. level of knowledge of some subject, but it can't do an entry level job of someone in that field.
Humans have always been and continue to be really bad at guessing what will be easy for computers to do and what will be hard, and we're discovering that the hardest things for computers to do are not what we thought, so the Turing Test must remain defined as a test in which the computer passes if it is indistinguishable from a human being. That is not the same as sounding like a human being or doing a lot of things only humans could do until recently.
It is still trivial to distinguish an AI from a human being because it has a very distinctive writing style that it struggles to deviate from, it cannot answer a lot of very simple questions that most intelligent people can answer, and it refuses to do a lot of things of things like use racial slurs, give instructions for dangerous actions, and answer questions with politically incorrect answers.
We shouldn't be too surpised that AI can do well on these benchmarks but not lead to massive productivity increases because doing well on benchmarks isn't AGI. There aren't very many jobs that consist of completing benchmarks.
AI is still pretty dumb in some sense. The latest estimates of the number of neurons these models have that I've heard are on the order of 2 trillion. That would make it about as smart as a fox. That's smarter than a cat but dumber than a dog. If a company said they were investing in dog breeding to see if they could get them to replace humans, would you expect a huge increase to our GDP just because it turns out they're better than almost anyone at finding the locations of smells (implying they could be better than us at most things)? Or what if they bred cats to help catch rodents or apes to instantly memorize visual layouts? It seems absurd only because dogs have been around for a long time and we're used the idea that they can't do human jobs and being good at smelling doesn't predict other cognitive abilities. Chimpanzees are far more intelligent than any AI, but I haven't heard of them taking anyone's job yet.
The difference with AI is it is rapidly improving and we can expect it to reach human intelligence before too long, but we are clearly not there yet and benchmarks are not going to give us more than a rough idea of how close we are to it unless those benchmarks start getting a lot closer to the things we actually want AI to do.
The Turing test has been performed with GPT-4, and it passed 54% of the time (compared to humans being suspected as human 67% of the time.)
I think Turing imagined the test with humans like himself. The species that literally thought the weather was a sapient being propably cannot be trusted with this by default.
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That's a nice experiment you have there. It would be a shame if someone were to replicate it. (Or look at the original paper) That howtogeek article is seriously overselling it.
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