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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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The idea that GPT-4 has smart-high-schooler levels of intelligence is silly.

And if you asked some 110 IQ high-schoolers this question, half would get it wrong. Half get the original question wrong or can't even supply an answer. There are plenty of examples of this even among very intelligent people. 75% of economics PhD students and professors got this simple question about opportunity costs wrong, because it was worded strangely. Despite the fact that it's formally an easy question to answer. It's easy to trick LLMs just like it's easy to trick people. Doesn't mean either are stupid.

I'm not saying the current models do original meaningful reasoning. If they could the whole world would be turned upside down and we wouldn't be debating if they could.

I think GPT-20 will be able to do that kind of thing in 50 years, either because all we need is scaling; or, because, we will make some new advance in the underlying architecture.

My point is more that high schoolers don't do meaningful original reasoning either. Monkey see, Monkey do. Most human innovation is just random search that is copied by others.

The fact that this machine is dumb isn't surprising, almost all things are dumb, and most humans are. That it can do anything at all is an innovation that puts all the rest to shame.

It's like being mad the first organism that evolved a proto-neuron or proto-central nervous system can't add 2+2 correctly.