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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:
Well, given that benchmarks show that we now have "super-human" AI, let's go! We can do everything we ever wanted to do, but didn't have the manpower for. AMD drivers competitive with NVIDIA's for AI? Let's do it! While you're at it, fork all the popular backends to use it. We can let it loose in popular OSes and apps and optimize them so we're not spending multiple GB of memory running chat apps. It can fix all of Linux's driver issues.
Oh, it can't do any of that? Its superhuman abilities are only for acing toy problems, riddles and benchmarks? Hmm.
Don't get me wrong, I suppose there might be some progress here, but I'm skeptical. As someone who uses these models, every release since the CoT fad kicked off didn't feel like it was gaining general intelligence anymore. Instead, it felt like it was optimizing for answering benchmark questions. I'm not sure that's what intelligence really is. And OpenAI has a very strong need, one could call it an addiction, for AGI hype, because it's all they've really got. LLMs are very useful tools -- I'm not a luddite, I use them happily -- but OpenAI has no particular advantage there any more; if anything, for its strengths, Claude has maintained a lead on them for a while.
Right now, these press releases feel like someone announcing the invention of teleportation, yet I still need to take the train to work every day. Where is this vaunted AGI? I suppose we will find out very soon whether it is real or not.
Yeah, I mean, the AI hype train people are aware that from the perspective of an interested but still fundamentally "outside" normie, the last years have basically consisted of continuous breathless announcements that AGI is six months away or literally here and our entire lifes are going to change, with the actual level of change in one's actual daily life being... well, existent, of course, especially if one's working an adjacent field, but still quite less than promised?
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