[MichaelBosworth]

Would be curious to hear an elaboration on this perspective. In your opinion, on which measures of intelligence would GPT-4 fail to out-perform a human with an IQ of 80? Conversely, on which measures do you imagine it would succeed at doing so? Are the latter less significant or valid than the former?

[chimprich]

Conscious thought. In biological terms it has a superhuman cerebellum but no cerebral cortex at all. It can't assess what it's doing.

GPT4 will produce stuff, but only if prodded to do so by a human.

I recently asked it to help me write some code for a Garmin smartwatch. The language used for this is MonkeyC, of which there isn't a huge amount of examples on the internet.

It confidently provided me with code, but it was terrible. There were gaps with comments suggesting what it should do, bugs, function calls that didn't exist, and many other problems.

I pointed out the issues and GPT4 kept apologising and trying new stuff, but without any improvement. There wasn't any intelligence there; the model had just intuited what a program might look like from sparse data, and then kept doing the same thing. It didn't know what it was doing; it just took directions from me. It couldn't suggest ideas when it couldn't map to a concept in memory.

A human with an IQ of 80 would know if they didn't know how to code in MonkeyC. If they thought they did, they'd soon adjust their behaviour when they realised they couldn't. They'd know where the limit of their knowledge was. They wouldn't keep trying to guess what functions were available. If they didn't have any examples in memory of what the functions might be like, they might come up with novel workarounds, or they'd appreciate what program I was trying to write and suggest a different approach.

Presumably we'll make progress on this at some point, but I think it'll take new breakthroughs, not just throwing more parameters at existing models.

[hammyhavoc]

Exactly my experiences. With a fucking NGINX configuration, for which I provided it the documentation, and the URL rewrite lines it would require. I spent days on trying to find the value that other people are claiming it has.

[spookthesunset]

Same. Those videos of people letting ChatGPT have almost certainly edited out the hours they spent trying to force the thing to spit out usable code. ChatGPT simply doesn't have enough context, nor the ability to "remember" context to do anything larger than a single function or two.

What makes it even more frustrating is to iterate, you constantly have to keep it updated with any changes you made outside of chatgpt.

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty useful but it is far from a silver bullet. Getting that last 20% (or even 30%) is going to be a lot of work...

[mise_en_place]

It's a gradient. You can't be too specific, but you can't be too general either. IME

[hammyhavoc]

Strangely, specificity is exactly what people champion the importance of when it comes to successful prompting.

[reso]

Humans handily outperform GPT4 handily on the task of "write a random string of length [x]" for any x > ~25.

[olddustytrail]

If you asked most people to perform that task, they literally wouldn't have a clue what you'd just asked them to do.

[pclmulqdq]

They have a specific device to do that now. I have tried to say "write a random sentence with 6 words and 2 numbers" and it completely fails, but it can do the straightforward "write a random [x] of length [y]."

[verbify]

I got

"Here is a random string of 32 characters:

a8Jk5pYr0Dm9Nc1Vz8Qf2Bt6Hg3Lw4Uo"

[reso]

Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s good at 32 because it’s a power of 2.

I’ve tested this with a wide variety of number inputs and it’s performance is highly variable. Error also increases linearly with strong length.

[ux-app]

a 4 year old would fail at this task.

does a 4 year old have intelligence?

[TeMPOraL]

Yup. I think this is the best point of comparison - a 4-6 year old kid. Specifically, one that hasn't gone to school yet. The difference between a typical 6-year old and a typical adult is in big part that the latter spent 10+ years being systematically fine-tuned.

Logic, arithmetics, algebra, precisely following steps of an algorithm - those are not skills one "kinda" just "gets" at some point, they're trained by deliberate practice, by solving lots and lots of problems specifically constructed to exercise those skills.

Point being, get GPT-4 through school, and then compare with adult performance on math-adjacent tasks. Or at least give it a chance by prompting it to solve it step-by-step as a problem, so it can search closer to the slice of latent space that encodes for relevant examples of similar problems and methods of solving them.

[hammyhavoc]

I started seriously using computers at 2.5, and I started writing and recording songs with a tape recorder at 3, won a local award for one song, and playing chess at 4. I know plenty of people with similar experiences. If you nurture kids and don't treat them like they're stupid, they can do some quite impressive things.

Anecdote: admittedly, I'm autistic as are the people I know, so maybe that's not a good sample. I struggle with a lot of basic shit even as an adult. Oh god, I empathize with the hypothetical GPT5.

[reso]

I did not say GPT4 did not have intelligence. I gave an example of a task it fails that is easy for most humans.