Comment by AndrewKemendo
6 days ago
Can someone tell me where your average every day human that’s walking around and has a regular job and kids and a mortgage would land on this leaderboard? That’s who we should be comparing against.
The fact that the only formal comparisons for AI systems that are ever done are explicitly based on the highest performing narrowly focused humans, tells me how unprepared society is for what’s happening.
Appreciate that: at the point in which there is unambiguous demonstration of superhuman level performance across all human tasks by a machine, (and make no mistake, that *is the bar that this blog post and every other post about AI sets*) it’s completely over for the human race; unless someone figures out an entirely new economic system.
The average person is bad at literally almost everything.
If I want something done, I'll seek out someone with a skill set that matches the problem.
I don't want AI to be as good as an average person. I want AI to be better than the person I would go to for help. A person can talk with me, understand where I've misunderstood my own problem, can point out faulty assumptions, and may even tell me that the problem isn't even a problem that needs solving. A person can suggest a variety of options and let me decide what trade-offs I want to make.
If I don't trust the AI to do that, then I'm not sure why I'd use it for anything other than things that don't need to be done at all, unless I can justify the chance that maybe it'll be done right, and I can afford the time lost getting it done right without the AI afterwards.
Which proves my point precisely that unless you’re superhuman in this definition, you’re obsolete.
Nothing new really, but there’s no where left to go for human labor and even that concept is being jeered at as a fantasy despite this attitude.
I really don't think it does, because we disagree on what the upper bound of an LLM is capable of reasoning about.
An average human may not be suitable for a given task, but a person with specialized skills will be. More than that, I believe they will continue to outperform LLMs on solving unbounded problems- i.e. those problems without an obvious, algorithmic solution.
Anything that requires brute force computation can be done by an LLM more quickly, assuming you have humans you trust to validate the output, but that's about the extent of what I'm expecting them to achieve.
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"The average person is bad at literally almost everything."
Wow... that's quite a generalization. And not my experience at all.
The average person can’t play 99% of all musical instruments, speak 99% of all languages, do 99% of surgeries, recite 99% of all poems from memory etc.
We don’t ask the average person to do most things, either finding a specialist or providing training beforehand.
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More than 50% of people cannot write a 'hello world' program in any programming language.
More than 50% of people employed as software engineers cannot read an academic paper in a field like education, and explain whether the conclusions are sound, based on the experiment description and included data.
More than 50% of people cannot interpret an X-ray.
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Machines have always had superhuman capabilities in narrow domains. The LLM domain is quite broad but it's still just a LLM, beholden to its training.
The average everyday human does not have the time to read all available math texts. LLMs do, but they still can't get bronze. What does that say about them?
Average humans, no. Mathematicians with enough time and a well indexed database of millions of similar problems, probably.
We don't allow chess players to access a Syzygy tablebase in a tournament.
Average human would score exactly 0 at IMO.
That’s not how modern societies/economies work.
We have specialists everywhere.
My literal last sentence addresses this
> average every day human
Average math major can't get Brozne.