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Not even Turing himself intended the Turing test to be a serious measure of capability, it is entirely a figment of journo/sci-fi writers imaginations. I think Bing passes it right now – sure, it's crazy and dumb sometimes, but humans are also crazy and dumb, and in much the same (although not identical) manner, with pigheaded obstinacy, gaslighting, deliberate obtuseness. And from the point of view of more credulous humans, ELIZA was passing it well enough already – so the idea that it's still an open problem is inherently elitist and subjective. Crucially, it's not testing what we want to test: a machine's sentience/intelligence/consciousness or whatever it is that we are interested in cannot be reducible to its ability to deceptively mimic a human or a very humanoid agent. It's both a simple task if solved with exploits, and a harder one than a mere human-level AGI if solved honestly.
A sentience that lives a single forward pass can have high superhuman «resolution», even if limited capability due to its meager context. Larger contexts, persistent «tape», training objectives and architectures emphasizing long-range coherence, clever prompts, other gimmicks can improve its external presentation, but I doubt they change much in terms of the peak cognitive power of what exists under the hood.
Well you've probably read some snippets from ChatGPT and Bing that are also delivered in an authoritative tone and cogently phrased, but turn out to be total bullshit under scrutiny. Marcus is more of a stochastic chatbot than a SoTA model, less amenable to persuasion, less interested in new evidence. I think we shouldn't worry too much about opinions of people who are outperformed by bots. Gwern's classic rant sums up this topic adequately.
I'd say our articulated understanding of what it means to «understand» something is laughable, and so we're making very little pop-philosophical progress in our discussion of how good our language models are. I want to write an effortpost on that, as well.
But plans and reality are different things.
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