alt Hacker NewsIt's pretty close to how we measure IQ. The standard test is basically a series of spatial puzzles.
I know there's a lot of people who complain that we're moving goalposts, but I think that the progress in LLMs really just shows that we don't know how to really measure intelligence in the first place, if we understand it as "human-like agency / ingenuity / adaptability". For decades, we saw the Turing test as the proxy for AGI, but then early LLMs could easily pass for a human in a casual conversation while clearly not matching human performance on most other tasks.
Since then, every benchmark we come up with, it turns out that an LLM can be fine-tuned to solve it while still clearly lacking something. They make very non-human mistakes, are easily tricked because they have a pretty tenuous grasp of reality, etc. But I think this just shows that AGI is a meaningless marketing term. We could as well be arguing if they have souls.
Replies
IQ tests are incredibly good at what they're designed for, which is discriminating relatively higher intelligence humans from lower intelligence humans. Also discriminating within a single human - they are routinely and reliably used to track cognitive decline.
For these purposes they are highly reliable (repeatable, internally consistent) and valid (correlate with ~everything to about the degree one would reasonably expect).
They were never designed for machines or non-human animals.
Nor were they designed for rare ranges of intelligence - these are by definition hard to create tests for, since it's hard to gather the sample sizes you need. So they work well for the middle ~98% of humans but can't discriminate well among the most profoundly intellectually disabled nor among true geniuses.
Pure software benchmarks might be getting saturated, but physical ones aren't.
Let LLM control a physical robot to perform tasks that average human can do.
Nit: Turing’s actual imitation game is a party game (like Werewolf/Mafia) and nobody’s even trying to win at that. The LLM’s will just tell you they’re an AI.
I don't think IQ is a good measure for intelligence at all. Neither dolphins or octopuses can solve IQ tests.
When I was 18, my high school girlfriend took me to the local Mensa chapter’s New Year’s party because her mother was a member and she was used to hanging out there.
It was a useful lesson that whatever IQ tests measure, it is completely devoid of value or interest to me.