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Well for the last 4 years we've been burning through benchmarks at great speed. We're onto ARC-AGI 3 now, SWE-Pro is just now out... What benchmark were they supposed to make 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago? How would that benchmark help with anything? We can already see a clear trend in rapid capability growth. Just the other day OpenAI's entry trounced a bunch of people at the AtCoder world programming contest. In that sense it's 'superhuman'. Not in all senses but in some, certainly.
These were the guys who are worried about recursive self improvement and then we have Anthropic nerfing Fable's ML skills so it doesn't help competitors making AI, we have OpenAI guys on twitter saying 'GPT5.6 Sol did the post-training on GPT5.6 Luna'.
That seems pretty self-improving to me? Doesn't seem like ASI is too far distant.
Has the legal system come up with a benchmark for aligning humans in the last 5000 years? Not really, that's not something we can do. We can tell between more or less trustworthy people though, set up incentives and checks and scrutiny. Same with AIs. There are a tonne of benchmarks for safety, just like there are tonnes of checks put on people working in intelligence agencies. Do they actually work, would they work on something inhuman and super smart? Who knows! That's the whole point!
It's an innately tough problem. How do you tell if your subordinate is planning to betray you? This issue is older than human civilization and has certainly not been benchmarked!
There are lots of other reasons to be skeptical about their assumptions. Them not producing a tonne of benchmarks should not be one of them. Their desire seems to be pretty good, it's just an innately hard problem.
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