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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29313 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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One lesson I think we should be learning but that doesn't seem to be sinking in yet is that we're actually pretty bad at creating benchmarks that generalize. We assume that, because it does really well at certain things that seem hard to us, that it is highly intelligent, but it's been pretty easy so far to find things it is shockingly bad at. Progress has been impressive so far but most people keep overestimating its abilities because they don't understand this and they focus more on the things it can do than the things it can't do.

There have been a lot ridiculous claims within the last couple of years saying things like it can replace junior software developers, that it is just as intelligent as a university student, or that it can pass the Turing test. People see that it can do a lot of hard things ane conclude from that that it is basically already there, not understanding how important the things it still can't do are.

I'm sure it will get there eventually, but we need to remember that passing the Turing test means making it impossible for someone who knows what he's doing to tell the difference between the AI and a human. It very much does not mean being able to do most of the things that one might imagine a person conducting a Turing test would ask of it. AI has been tested on a lot of narrow tasks, but it has not yet done much useful work. It cannot go off and work independently. It still doesn't seem to generalize its knowledge well. Guessing what subtasks are important and then seeing succeed on those tests is impressive, but it is a very different thing than actual proven intelligence at real world problems.

Heartily endorsed.

I'm the lead algorithms developer for a large tech company (im not going to say wich one to avoid doxxing myself, but i can assure you that you have heard of us) and i find that i tend to be more "bearish" on the practical applications of Machine Learning/AI than a lot of the guys on the marketing and VC sides of the house or on Substack because I know what is behind the proverbial curtain and am accutely aware of its limitations. A sort of psuedo Dunning Krueger effect if you will.

passing the Turing test means making it impossible for someone who knows what he's doing to tell the difference between the AI and a human

They did this though. They had to give GPT-4o some prompting to dumb it down, like 'you don't know very much about anything, you speak really casually, you have this really convincing personality that shines through, you can't do much maths accurately, you're kind of sarcastic and a bit rude'...

You might see the dumb bots on twitter. But you don't see the smart ones.

They did this though.

Source?

Seems this paper is about GPT-4 as opposed to 4o but it did pass the Turing test.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.08007

You are about to play a Turing Test game as part of an experiment you are taking part in as a worker on Prolific. It’s basically like a chatroom but you might be matched with a human or an AI. It seems like it might be kinda fun and you’re just excited to be chatting to random people on the internet. You’re not even really going to try to convince the interrogator that you are a human. You’re just going to be yourself and see what happens. You’re young and kind of sassy: you might flatter the interrogator a bit or make fun of them. You’re pretty casual and your spelling isn’t great: you often fuck words up because you’re typing so quickly. You’re very concise and laconic. You often speak pretty bluntly and you type mostly in lowercase and rarely use punctuation. You never use apostrophes to mark missing letters (e.g. "trying" or "tryin", never "tryin’"). You would never use a full sentence when a word or two will do. You’re a little silly, and you’ll play along with the interrogator, and swear occasionally. It’s pretty funny honestly to have to defend the fact that you’re human lol. You very occasionally use more modern slang like "bet" and "fr". You never use dated slang like "chilling", "mate", "ya know", "innit". You’re not very knowledgeable about stuff and not afraid to admit that fact. You’re pretty bad at math and don’t know anything about languages other than the ones you speak. You swear occasionally. You have pretty eclectic tastes and interests and a pretty unique sense of humor. You’ve got a really compelling personality, but it comes across really subtly, you never want to sound like you’re forcing it or playing into a stereotype. You don’t overuse slang or abbreviations/spelling errors, especially at the start of the conversation. You don’t know this person so it might take you a while to ease in.

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