Thread

1. ErrantX · 1790879836 · focus · HN ↗

   What is interesting to me is in 2016 people were like; pass Turing test, write code, order me a coffee.

   And even in 2024 the themes are similar, generally more complex or specific about the coding/turing/action test.

   But in 2026 a huge shift, we have things like; can open a physical door, emulates human pettiness convincingly, makes novel scientific breakthroughs.

   That alone tells you a lot IMO

   1. ianjbutler · 1790882681 · focus · HN ↗

      Sigh, the whole "obviously the turing test is solved" meme is annoying.

      Like, if we meant that it convincingly masquerades as a shitposter, ok. But everyone still bitches about AI slop, and everyone knows the writing is still bad. How does that even work if the turing test is obviously solved?

      More to the point though, if you grill SOTA models on counterfactuals, causal world-models etc, you'll trip them up in a way that actually will not work on ESL students and children. Certainly there's no way to find a person that struggles with that and is also capable of cheerful fluent erudite discussion about astrophysics with perfect grammar. Yes, it's getting harder obviously.. but detecting machines with determined, focused and intelligent interrogation remains pretty easy. If nothing else, the models are cooperative where people wouldn't be and that's a signal too.

      The best progress we've made is that most people do agree that this doesn't practically matter very much, i.e. we generally recognize the stakes were always overstated. But the constant vague appeals to common-sense that "of course it's a solved problem!" always feels naive or fake.

      1. CamperBob2 · 1790905165 · focus · HN ↗

         How does that even work if the turing test is obviously solved?

         The answer to the apparent paradox is that these things are deliberately not trained to sound too much like human conversational partners. The labs don't want the bad press that they'd get from people creating deceptively-convincing bots, or from people forming emotional bonds with them like they did with GPT-4o. If you actually RLHF'ed a frontier-grade LLM to pass a Turing test, rest assured, it could do it.

         "It's not x, it's y" and other goofy superficial tells do not have to be part of an LLM's response. But the last thing OpenAI wants to release is a GPT-4o with twice the IQ, so we have to put up with a lot of stupid clanker clichés.

         For evidence, just look back at the best conversational models from a couple of years ago, and you will probably agree that they are better at fooling humans than their newer counterparts are.

         1. christina97 · 1790906405 · focus · HN ↗

            I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think the AI labs are too concerned about bad press lately. It’s more likely that there actually are some tradeoffs where training on synthetic data gives the model tics but is the only way to improve intelligence.

            1. CamperBob2 · 1790907848 · focus · HN ↗

               True, increased use of synthetic data could be a load-bearing part of it, I imagine. So to speak.

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