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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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A big problem is how you measure intelligence.

Any human can count the number of r's in strawberry but most would be hard-pressed to translate Chinese to English or do anything at all in python or other programming languages. Intelligence is multi-domain, possibly the most complicated thing we can try to measure.

Even within domains, how do you rate intelligence? Sometimes it would be worth spending 10x more to get a marginally better programming AI because 'marginally better' is like a 0 to 1 increase in that it provides genuinely useful input that a human can use to get a good answer and speed up their work.

A new brutally hard question set dropped a few days ago. I have no idea what any of this gibberish means, it's well beyond me.

https://epochai.org/frontiermath

The two toned-down o1 models get 1%, along with GPT-4. Claude 3.5 and Gemini Pro get 2%. Does it follow that Claude 3.5 new is smarter than I am since I would get 0 and that therefore AGI has been achieved? Probably not, Sonnet 3.5 makes all kinds of order of magnitude mistakes that I can eyeball as wrong. But it is pretty damn smart and noticeably smarter than its older incarnation, it has certain new tendencies in writing that qualitatively improve it.

GPT-2 would get 0 on nearly all benchmarks because it just babbles. GPT-3 would also get 0 because it just babbles (albeit more interestingly), remember these are the base models that might just answer your question with more questions. GPT-3.5 was the inflection point where AI became useful for a bunch of things, for consumer use. The old GPT-4 (as of March 2023) opened up coding. Opus 3 was thought to be the first really creative writer, it can maintain an engaging twitter persona. Sonnet 3.5 is on a whole new level in coding, opening up Cursor. The newest Sonnet, o1 and Gemini can start to barely grapple with these advanced mathematical questions.

From the perspective of 'can it answer Frontier Math', there have been no advances in AI before the last 6 months or so. Intelligence is so complex, what looks like a slowdown in one domain can just be the start of something new in another domain.