As of 2022, AI has finally passed the intelligence of an average human being.

For example on the SAT it scores in the 52nd percentile

On an IQ test, it scores slightly below average

How about computer programming?

But self-driving cars are always 5-years-away, right?

C'mon, there's got to be something humans are better at.

How about drawing?

Composing music?

Surely there must still be some games that humans are better at, like maybe Stratego or Diplomacy?

Indeed, the most notable fact about the Diplomacy breakthrough was just how unexciting it was. No new groundbreaking techniques, no largest AI model ever trained. Just the obvious methods applied in the obvious way. And it worked.

Hypothesis

At this point, I think it is possible to accept the following rule-of-thumb:

For any task that one of the large AI labs (DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta) is willing to invest sufficient resources in they can obtain average level human performance using current AI techniques.

Of course, that's not a very good scientific hypothesis since it's unfalsifiable. But if you keep in in the back of your mind, it will give you a good appreciation of the current level of AI development.

But.. what about the Turing Test?

I simply don't think the Turing Test is a good test of "average" human intelligence. Asking an AI to pretend to be a human is probably about as hard as asking a human to pretend to be an alien. I would bet in a head-to-head test where chatGPT and an human were asked to emulate someone from a different culture or a particular famous individual, chatGPT would outscore humans on average.

The "G" in AGI stands for "General", those are all specific use-cases!

It's true that the current focus of AI labs is on specific use-cases. Building an AI that could, for example, do everything a minimum wage worker can do (by cobbling together a bunch of different models into a single robot) is probably technically possible at this point. But it's not the focus of AI labs currently because:

Building a superhuman AI focused on a specific task is more economically valuable than building a much more expensive AI that is bad at a large number of things.
Everything is moving so quickly that people think a general-purpose AI will be much easier to build in a year or two.

So what happens next?

I don't know. You don't know. None of us know.

Roughly speaking, ther...

Spencer Fisher

Spencer Fisher