Comment by matherial
10 hours ago
It'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.
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.
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.
At the risk of sounding like one of those people at Mensa that annoyed you...
The people at Mensa aren't a valid sample of people who score high on IQ tests, because there is a such a strong selection effect for people with certain personality traits, such as wanting to join a club based on your IQ.
Or, to put it as Groucho Marx did:
"Please accept my resignation, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJHUres_2xU&t=228s
By looking at interactions of people in Mensa I feel like 2% of top IQ is actually too low bar to notice anything particular about "high" IQ people. We are still pretty random in our interests and performance.
To be fair, Mensa is a Venn diagram between IQ and being a douche.
I suspect my IQ isn’t quite high enough to join Mensa but I’ve always flirted with the idea of trying to join and getting in just to see what a group of Mensa people are like.
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What does having value or interest to you have to do with intelligence?
What does IQ have to do with intelligence?
(Please forgive the flippant response. I believe it cuts to the core of what the parent was intending.)
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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.
What makes you think this task won't fall quickly too?
It might, but if there's one thing that hasn't changed since 2022, it's that the models tend to ace the tasks where you have gobs of training data and where verification loops are fast and cheap... and they are not nearly as amazing elsewhere. If it's close enough, they can generalize, e.g. translate one programming language to another. But there's a pretty steep cliff past a certain distance.
Case in point: you had hundreds of millions of JPEGs to vacuum up and bitmap image generation is amazing. But if you ask them to recreate the same scene as vector art, they will struggle to generate a decent SVG. Like, kindergarten-style pelicans on bicycles are the state of the art. It should generalize seamlessly, but somehow, doesn't?
I think it will happen, just like self-driving cars are happening, but it will probably be a slow process.
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.
This is an artifact of how we deliberately craft these models though. We could just as easily fine tune a model that will believe it is not an AI or will attempt to deceive users asking about it
There's a lot more to it. For example, its writing style would also have to improve so it doesn't immediately give itself away.
Also, the skill of the human opponents matters. You'd want to test it against people who have practiced playing the game. Otherwise, it's like the difference between building a chess bot that can win against random undergrads who don't normally play, versus winning against grandmasters. And it's not like there's a pool of skilled human players of the imitation game.
I don't think IQ is a good measure for intelligence at all. Neither dolphins or octopuses can solve IQ tests.
Their input and output interfaces are too different from human's and they're not nearly as smart to take our IQ tests, but both dolphins and octopuses can solve complex puzzles tailored for their environment. Those puzzles are the whole reason scientists know that dolphins and octopuses are more intelligent than other animals.
But we do know they're "intelligent" and also smart in an important capacity. So how gives we don't measure them by IQ? Because the IQ is not a good measure of intelligence or smarts.
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