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  • The Turing test is interesting, because I believe that the current LLMs are perfectly capable of parsing the it in many situations. On the other hand we also have people are sound like they aren't real.

    Looking back, was the Turing test flawed perhaps? It failed to take into account that humans can be rather bad at telling actual people from a "parrot". Turing was perhaps a little to optimistic about people.

    by mrweasel
  • I am more interested in the 18 people who replied "yes" to "An AI wrote an entire coherent book".

    Maybe they mean a non-fiction "Learn Javascript in 21 Days" type of book? If not, I really want to read a novel-length (or even novelletee - 80k words or so) book written by an AI to see for myself if the results are comparable to non-self-published authors.

    by lelanthran
  • Very pleased one of my predictions was totally wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23252711

    Sure, sure, what LLMs make still isn't "efficient bug-free code": my prediction is falsified because while LLMs can write and train new models with machine learning, ML is fundamentally not advanced enough to throw arbitraty new tasks at like this.

    by ben_w
  • One thing I thought about as I responded to these: in many cases, I am convinced that a present-day LLM could accomplish the task at least once given an infinite compute budget and an infinite number of tries. For example: "An AI surprises its user by asking them a question out of the blue." This has absolutely happened. But some of these are not routine occurrences, or the model cannot (at present) routinely and reliably complete the task in question. I wouldn't build a workflow that assumed an LLM's capacity to ask unprompted "out of the blue" questions.

    I thought the different variations on "could AI pass the Turing test?" were interesting in this regard. Surely any frontier LLM could pass a Turing test for some amount of time, and that's been the case for at least a year now. But I don't think we're anywhere close to a model that could pass an "adversarial" Turing test for an extended period of time.

    by deepwoods
  • Heh, there's one of mine: https://stoppels.ch/goalposts/?c=39727943

    "GPT-4 looks at original ASCII art of a foot, not copied from the web, and says it is a foot."

    The vote is currently 64% yes, 18% no.

    Just now I asked Opus 5.5 to generate an ASCII art foot, and it did a passable job. It's not great, but it's a foot. Then I pasted it into ChatGPT (whatever they're serving to the free tier by default, which seems to be 5.6 Luna), and it said it was a "train/locomotive": https://chatgpt.com/share/6abeaa39-cc80-83ed-851f-29370db089...

    Maybe it's Opus's fault for drawing a bad foot but I think it's fair to say LLMs are still pretty bad at ASCII art (without additional tool calling etc).

    by Retr0id
  • At least 1/3rd of these predictions aren't clear enough to determine exactly what is being claimed/predicted. Even after reading the full comment multiple times, on a lot of them I couldn't tell where the author had set the goalposts well enough to say whether we've crossed it or not.
    by bmenrigh
  • There's one of mine in there where I predicted in 2023 that it would be 20 years until AI would be reliably able to entirely build and deploy arbitrary applications from a prompt. I was off by about 18 years on that one!
    by joegibbs
  • My comment about humanity's last exam being a misnomer is included, and I proposed better ideas about what a last exam could look like. One of the things I said was "solve an open math problem" which has conclusively been done with Navier-Stokes (regardless of the controversy surrounding that). However, in the spirit of clarifying the goalposts, AI has only passed 1/6 of the tests I proposed. 17% is not a passing grade, so I'd say no, my challenge has not been met.

    Another thing to note is that the (presumably AI-generated) summary of my challenge does not accurately represent what I wrote, listing only half the things I said and saying "or" rather than "and".

    by hatthew

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