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I haven't posted too much about AI on here, largely because my own personal experiences with using it have been boring and underwhelming. Generating offensive memes (9/11 gender reveal, racial stereotypes, etc.) is my most positive interaction with AI. And partly because I find the pro-AI "AGI is just around the corner bro!" crowd obnoxious as hell, and I find that most discussions about it depend on accepting certain massive assumptions about what we actually do (and don't) know about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, the human brain, etc. For the purposes of making my biases clear up front: Personally, I'm religious and believe in the existence of a human spirit/soul, so I'm already strongly biased against claims that consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently advanced systems or any arguments along those lines.
Regardless, a few developments have happened recently that have motivated me enough to actually make a top-level post about this. The first being my (employer-mandated) use of Claude to generate code. "You're not using the latest model, just one more model and we'll reach AGI"-bros officially in shambles after this one. I have an HTTP API client library I wrote a few years ago for interacting with a 3rd party API. There's a good amount of duplicate logic throughout for things like setting up and making the requests, caching, etc. I asked Claude to look over the code and extract out the duplicate logic into a single implementation Here's how it messed up just the authentication part of it:
This was with the latest version of Claude Sonnet. We don't have access to the latest version of Opus, but I'm sure an AI-bro on here would insist that Opus would totally get this right. Regardless, it failed spectacularly at what would be an easy (but tedious) task for a mid-level developer and above (or a sufficiently talented junior).
The second happening is the ARC prize people releasing version 3 of their AGI test suite, a series of puzzle games. They released it within a few hours of Jensen Huang saying he thinks the latest and greatest models are capable of AGI. Humans were capable of solving 100% of the puzzles. The highest scoring AI couldn't complete more that 0.5%.
I'm willing to bet future models will do st least somewhat better on this, but only because I'm maximally cynical and I fully expect these puzzles to be included in the training set for future SOTA models.
I tried several of the puzzles myself, and none of them are terribly difficult. I'd estimate that anyone in the 100-110 IQ range or higher would be able to solve most or all of them. This development has further reinforced my belief that LLMs are basically just really advanced statistical regression models on crack, but nothing approaching what we would consider actual intelligence or conscious thought (and this is before we get into Chinese Room style criticisms of them).
In any case, I'm curious to see what you all think of these. Even the AI-bros I've been speaking about condescendingly throughout this post. If anything, I'm actually most curious about and interested in the AI-bros responses, I'd love to hear yoyr thoughts.
Here are the AGI puzzles for anyone interested in trying them out: https://arcprize.org/arc-agi/3
Metaphysics aside, it has been blindingly obvious for a long time that LLMs do not have intelligence or reasoning ability. Look at tests like "how many R's are in strawberry", which could be passed by even the stupidest human as long as he had enough intelligence to have learned the alphabet. But LLMs fell flat on their face. And that's not the only instance; this stuff keeps happening. Whether or not LLMs are useful (I personally do not find them useful, as I've said in previous comments), they are most certainly not intelligent.
Mild agree. They aren't very creative. They definitely don't actually understand the world and are just """pretending""" to understand, which gets you most of the way there but isn't the same.
They clearly have this, what would you call what a "reasoning model" does?
Horrible selection given this is due to how tokens work. The carwash riddle that made the rounds recently is a way better example.
No, the car wash example is much worse. Rs in strawberry is something anyone who can spell can count out. The car wash riddle is something most intelligent people should catch if told to look out for it, but many of them still, let alone people of average or below average intelligence, will stumble over and fail because they skim the question or don’t actually catch the ‘trick’. It’s like a lot of classic riddles in that way.
Are you asserting that realizing that washing a car at the car wash requires a car is a trick? I asked half a dozen people that I know from a few different venues, from a bright high schooler, to a college professor, to a water heater installer, and they all looked at me like I was retarded for even asking the question.
I asked some people in my office and a couple got it wrong, I’ve met even smart people who miss basic gotcha riddles like this
Huh.
Maybe it's a rural/urban divide. How many of them own cars and drive regularly?
Probably none, but most people here have still driven at some point, and it’s not like they lack knowledge of what a car is.
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