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Yes, we are. Goodhart's Law only applies if you create a metric that works and then future models train towards it. Our problem is that it's getting really hard to make any kind of objective digital test that humans do well at and current AI doesn't. We humans still do many things better than AI (like parsing visual information in real time, for instance - you can see how slow Astra is at playing Pokemon), but this is more about the form factor. In theory, if humans are still the smartest things on the planet, there should exist "pure" tests of intellectual reasoning that we can beat AIs at. This no longer seems to be the case.
I had a better reply typed out but then i spilled beer on my desk and rebooting my computer ate the reply...
I"m unconvinced that finetuning is not going on with existing metrics and that a large part of the increase in current capabilities is the development of additional data designed to beat the metrics because there are billions of dollars riding on it. How much of the increase in math ability of the latest gens is because we now have math datasets explicitly for increasing the math ability because it is finally cost-effective from a business case to spend time and money creating math datasets? OpenAI did not zero-shot the Navier Stokes with a model that has never seen a math proof. The increase in AI capabilities appears to be directly correlated with the development of increasingly specialized datasets whereas previous AI developments were forced to depend on datasets that curated existing data from a general non-AI focused use, not creating them out of whole cloth.
I think, if anything, this is a chance for humans to take a look in the mirror and realize that we are not beings of pure intellectual reasoning. We are highly specialized social animals that happen to excel at problem solving in diverse environments. We have a good set of general intelligence skills yes, and we are adaptable, but the biggest of all is that we are socially focused to an extreme degree. We did not outcompete our environment through pure logical reasoning but through social multi-agent problem solving and cooperation. It is very likely that we will be bested on "pure" intelligence tests by a non-evolutionarily derived being. We should make our peace with that. Anthropocentrism is a crutch.
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