What would it mean for an AI to beat the best humans in a 5K race? Obviously robots can do that, is there some definition of "humanoid AI robot" which exists for such a task?
I think to have meaning the AI would have to work both as generally and usefully as a human, and fit entirely within a human size profile (not offloading compute remotely). What makes humans competing against each other even remotely worth paying attention to is the constraints, which is that we're all autonomous, we all have similar size, we all can function to a similar degree.
Plenty of animals can beat humans at all sorts of things, but they can't do so while also standing in as a human, so the comparisons aren't very interesting. Building a robot that has a human profile and can run and beat humans at a 5k race also isn't very interesting (at this point), because fine, you created a running robot, but that robot's not going to do it's own taxes at the end of the year, so in the sense of AI, who cares.
> beat humans at a 5k race also isn't very interesting (at this point), because fine, you created a running robot, but that robot's not going to do it's own taxes at the end of the year, so in the sense of AI, who cares.
It depends exactly on what we're saying. So far we have machines that can navigate language well, but aren't good at navigating real world environments. If we're talking about a road 5k race, with myriad ways that courses are marked and many, many distracting, this is at least an interesting problem (perhaps as difficult as self driving vehicles).
Being able to navigate the course is an interesting problem. I'm not sure beating a human at it is, unless we change the problem to be accomplishing something useful (lugging a certain amount of weight up a cliff face for rescue operations, for example), or make the contestant AI sufficiently human like.
A 5k race is about competition, not about doing useful work. For AI or a robot to compete and win and have it mean anything means it needs to be similar enough to the other contestants to make that competition matter, otherwise I could slap a picture of my face on an RC car with enough batteries and "win". We all realize intuitively that a "win" such as that tells us nothing useful, so would ignore it even if it somehow was allowed. AI is a bit less intuitive to many at this point, so it's not always as obvious.
Well, sure. IBM's Jeopardy PR stunt with Watson is an instance of that: it was definitely "buzzer doping."
At the same time, included in that "win" was a big technical feat. So it would be with winning a 5k race.
(Not to mention that right now nothing we have capable of bipedal or even quadripedal locomotion is capable of the feat, so if we rule out the RC car it's quite the mechanical accomplishment, too--- even if we're throwing a ridiculous amount of power density and big actuators at the problem).
Beyonh Watson buzzer doping, it's interesting but not as much as some people make it out to be. Since it isn't an autonomous package equivalent to a person. At the time, it was the size of a master bedroom. If we compared it to a room jull of smart people, does Watson still seem impressive in it's feat?
Similarly, getting a mechanical package that can traverse a course like a human using locomotion like a human, which would be much more impressive if it's not running of flat asphalt. But like you note, we can't do that even entirely abstracting away the AI portion, so the question of what will happen when an AI wins a 5k is mostly moot, there's many steps to get there that we haven't gotten close to, and even when we've solved all the aspects separately (a general AI, locomotion, power density) it will likely be a while after that (if ever) before they are solved together in a package that compete.
Im not saying humans are the epitome of these systems come together, but I doubt evolution has left us with a completely horrible design, especially if were talking about thinking and running, two things humans are known for being quite good at (to our own knowledge).
Eh, picking arbitrary metrics like that -- the size of Watson -- isn't too useful. For most of these things, like Watson-- we're concerned about whether it could do it more cheaply (less resource intensively) than a human. Watson also does the job on much less sleep and doesn't get bored.
(And a room of smart people is not likely to be much better at this kind of quick decision task than a single smart person).
And now, you can fit 16TB of ram in a couple rack units with boring hardware, though you'd need perhaps a quarter rack to get equivalent memory bandwidth.
> but I doubt evolution has left us with a completely horrible design, especially if were talking about thinking and running, two things humans are known for being quite good at (to our own knowledge).
LLM's are making me less sure that we're so good at thinking. We may be good at making quick decisions and navigating social hierarchies in a relatively low power budget, but that's a different thing...
Plenty of animals can beat humans at all sorts of things, but they can't do so while also standing in as a human, so the comparisons aren't very interesting. Building a robot that has a human profile and can run and beat humans at a 5k race also isn't very interesting (at this point), because fine, you created a running robot, but that robot's not going to do it's own taxes at the end of the year, so in the sense of AI, who cares.