Comment by p-e-w
5 days ago
Benchmaxxing isn’t the only problem. Evaluating an intelligence is a task that generally requires at least an equally capable intelligence, if not one of greater capability.
That’s why students are evaluated by teachers with more knowledge and experience than them. It follows that any mechanical evaluation scheme is hopelessly inadequate for measuring the true capabilities of a frontier language model.
> students are evaluated by teachers with more knowledge and experience than them
This starts to break down in college when the professors often at best only slightly ahead. (they have more knowledge and experience - but in a slightly different area and so it isn't relevant to the depth of whatever is under consideration) Grad school is about advancing the state of the art - if you don't know more than your professor you are doing it wrong.
> This starts to break down in college when the professors often at best only slightly ahead. (they have more knowledge and experience - but in a slightly different area and so it isn't relevant to the depth of whatever is under consideration)
I can't speak to the humanities, but this estimation is just not true at most universities in the sciences. (EDIT: As cycomanic emphasizes below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477683), the part of the original comment pertaining to graduate education is more reasonable. I am speaking here only of undergraduate education.)
It certainly is true in physics and engineering that a PhD student at least half way through their PhD should know more than there supervisor about their topic (and usually much earlier). Even a Masters thesis project student should understand the intricacies of their project better than their supervisor. I'm speaking as someone who has supervised a significant number of both PhD and Masters students.
4 replies →
A grad student is evaluated by how well they are capable of following scientific procedures, communicated their results and have a sufficiently broad knowledge foundation. All that can easily be verified by a professor in a related field since they are very experienced in all those things. They don't actually need to be experts in the specific narrow topic the student has become the world expert in.
> Evaluating an intelligence is a task that generally requires at least an equally capable intelligence, if not one of greater capability.
How is this remotely true. You can have verifiable tasks that you can’t do. Where does this idea come from??
> How is this remotely true. You can have verifiable tasks that you can’t do. Where does this idea come from??
That is what benchmarks and intelligence tests are, which are vulnerable to benchmaxing etc. You wont be able to do this by gut feel though, you can create a personal benchmark though.
But point was that personal judgement of intelligence requires high intelligence. Creating a benchmark doesn't require as much but is more vulnerable.
Yet human judgement isn’t subject to side effects like fluency and persuasiveness? It’s like everyone in this thread dismisses benchmarks and then…describes a crappy benchmark.
Sure you can create a personal benchmark. Who will evaluate it, you? How many tasks will it have? How will you evaluate success? Will you know which model is which or will you be blind? Which one will you do first? Ah right, benchmarking.
Also, benchmaxxing isn’t possible when the benchmark and measurements come after the model is released, right?