I don't feel confused by LLMs seeming very smart while being unable to automate hard work.

Sometimes people find it mysterious or surprising that current AIs can't fully automate difficult tasks given how smart they seem. I don't find this very confusing.

Current LLMs are just not that "smart" (yet). They compensate using very broad knowledge and strong heuristics that are mostly domain-specific. In other words, they have high crystallized intelligence but lower fluid intelligence.

In humans, crystallized and fluid intelligence are very correlated due to limited time for learning and limited capacity for knowledge/memorization, but AIs can train for longer and (for unclear reasons) seem to have much higher capacity for knowledge/memorization. So, AI capabilities are often overestimated by naive comparisons. ^[1] I do find it somewhat mysterious/surprising that humans have such poor memory despite seemingly having so many parameters, and that some people have much better memory than others.

My view is that this crystallized vs fluid distinction is maybe the first principal component of human vs AI differences and this explains a lot of the differences, but not all of them. We can add an additional "component" to our analysis of fluid intelligence by distinguishing between short-run fluid intelligence (we could call this "adaptation") and longer term fluid intelligence (this might effectively be sample efficiency of longer run learning). I think AIs are relatively stronger at short-term fluid intelligence than long-term fluid intelligence.

To be clear, this doesn't mean I think extremely powerful AI isn't near: I expect full AI R&D automation ^[2] in <5.5 years ^[3] (and it seems 25% likely in <2.5 years). These AIs will likely retain an inhuman profile but will be trained heavily on relevant tasks (while still having much stronger fluid intelligence than current AIs). But pretty soon (0.25-4 years) after full AI R&D automation, I do expect AIs to exceed humans at everything including fluid intelligence ^[4] .

Also, I think that at the point when AIs fully match humans in fully general-purpose fluid intelligence and learning, they will likely be extremely superhuman in most domains (because they'll have other advantages and be able to train for much longer). And most types of R&D will get fully or virtually fully automated earlier.

(This was originally a tweet thread.)

1. Also, AIs might seem smarter than they actually are due to being faster which is also correlated with other forms of intelligence in humans. ↩︎

2. Really, I mostly mean the capability to fully automate AI R&D, people may not fully automate immediately in practice. ↩︎

3. As in, I put 50% probability within 5.5 years. ↩︎

4. At least putting aside government action. ↩︎