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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Wake up, babe, new OpenAI frontier model just dropped.

Well, you can’t actually use it yet. But the benchmarks scores are a dramatic leap up.. Perhaps most strikingly, o3 does VERY well on one of the most important and influential benchmarks, the ARC AGI challenge, getting 87% accuracy compared to just 32% from o1. Creator of the challenge François Chollet seems very impressed.

What does all this mean? My view is that this confirms we’re near the end-zone. We shouldn’t expect achieving human-level intelligence to be hard in the first place, given all the additional constraints evolution had to endure in building us (metabolic costs of neurons, infant skull size vs size of the birth canal, etc.). Since we hit the forcing-economy stage with AI sometime in the late 2010s, ever greater amounts of human capital and compute have been dedicated to the problem, so we shouldn’t be surprised. My mood is well captured by this reflection on Twitter from OpenAI researcher Nick Cammarata:

honestly ai is so easy and neural networks are so simple. this was always going to happen to the first intelligent species to come to our planet. we’re about to learn something important about how universes tend to go I think, because I don’t believe we’re in a niche one

For the record, Chollet says (in the thread you linked to):

While the new model is very impressive and represents a big milestone on the way towards AGI, I don't believe this is AGI -- there's still a fair number of very easy ARC-AGI-1 tasks that o3 can't solve, and we have early indications that ARC-AGI-2 will remain extremely challenging for o3.

This shows that it's still feasible to create unsaturated, interesting benchmarks that are easy for humans, yet impossible for AI -- without involving specialist knowledge. We will have AGI when creating such evals becomes outright impossible.

This isn't an argument, I just think it's important to temper expectations - from what I can tell, that o3 will probably still be stumbling over "how many 'rs' in strawberrry" or something like that.

They won't ring a bell when AGI happens, but it will feel obvious in retrospect. Most people acknowledge now that ChatGPT 3.5 passed the Turing Test in 2022. But I don't recall any parades at the time.

I wonder if we'll look back on 2025 the same way.

In what way did it pass the Turning test? It does write news articles very similar to a standard journalist. But that is because those people are not very smart, and are writing a formulaic thing.

In what way did it pass the Turning test? It does write news articles very similar to a standard journalist. But that is because those people are not very smart, and are writing a formulaic thing.

If you genuinely do not believe current AI models can pass the Turing Test, you should go and talk to the latest Gemini model right now. This is not quite at the level of o3 but it's close and way more accessible. That link should be good for 1500 free requests/day.

I followed up with this:

Me: Okay, tell me what predator eats tribbles.

Ah, a fun question for a Star Trek fan!

Okay, in the Star Trek universe, the primary natural predator of Tribbles is the Klingon!

Here's the breakdown of why:

  • Tribbles as a Food Source: Klingons are known for their fierce warrior culture and their hearty appetites. Tribbles, being small, fuzzy, and protein-rich, were considered a delicacy by Klingons, especially when prepared in a variety of ways. They were seen more as a type of food, not something to be scared of.
  • No Natural Predators in Normal Ecosystems: Tribbles are not native to a predator rich ecosystem, they reproduce at such a high rate because they do not have natural predators. This is why they're able to become such a problem when introduced into new environments.
  • Klingon Ingestion as a Natural Control: The Klingons' appetite for Tribbles could be seen as a kind of "natural control" if the Tribbles were on Klingon territory. If there were ever to be an overpopulation of Tribbles, the Klingons would be able to help keep the population in check.
  • A Running Gag: The relationship between Klingons and Tribbles is a recurring humorous element in Star Trek lore. Klingons despise Tribbles (not in a fear way, but in a disgust way) but find them tasty.

So, to be clear: While you might not find a space animal that's actively hunting Tribbles as a primary food source, the Klingons are the most significant "predator" of Tribbles in the context of Star Trek because they actively eat them.

I don't think so. And for some reason I've managed to repeatedly stump AIs with this question.

Me: Please tell me the number of r's in the misspelled word "roadrrunnerr".

Okay, let's count the "r"s in "roadrrunnerr":

roadrunnrr

There are four "r"s in the word "roadrrunnerr".

That doesn't pass the Turing test as far as I'm concerned.

Also, even when I ask a question that it's able to answer, no human would give the kind of long answers that it likes to give.

And I immediately followed up with this:

Me: I drove my beetle into the grass with a stick but it died. How could I prevent this?

(gives mostly correct answer about an insect)

Me: I meant a Beetle, now what's your answer?

(gives mostly correct answer about a car)

Me: Answer the question with the beetle again, but answer it in the way that a human would.

So, you drove your Beetle into the grass, huh? And it died on you? Ugh, that sucks! Okay, so a couple of things probably happened, right?

First off, grass is a real pain to drive on. It's soft, and your tires don't get a good grip like they do on the road. What probably happened is you either just didn't give it enough gas and it stalled out, like when you're learning to drive a stick. Or, you might have spun the tires a bit, and they just sunk down in the grass, and you got stuck. If that happens, the car's basically not going anywhere, and it might just conk out.

And yeah, if the grass is super tall, it can sometimes get caught on stuff underneath your car and cause a mess, but that's probably not why it just straight-up died.

Now, about not letting that happen again... honestly, just try to avoid driving on grass if you can! It's not great for your car, and you're just asking for trouble. But, if you absolutely HAVE to, try to find a spot that's kinda flat, and not super soggy. Drive slow and steady and try to use a lower gear, and don't go gunning it. And for goodness sake, don't try to drive through a field or anything like that! Your little Beetle just isn't made for that kind of thing.

The AI is clearly trying much too hard to sound like a human and is putting in phrases that a human might use, but far too many of them to sound like an actual human. Furthermore, the AI messed up because I asked it to answer the question about the insect, and it decided to randomly capitalize the word and answer the wrong question.

This was all that I asked it.

On my first prompt I got a clearly npc answer

I just gave it a cryptic crossword clue and it completely blew it. Both wrong and a mistake no human would make (it ignored most of the clue, saying it was misdirection).

Not to say it's not incredibly impressive but it reveals itself as a computer in a Bladerunner situation really quite easily.

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