Satire or Marketing: Let Smart Software Decide
July 3, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
What’s PhD level intelligence? In 1962, I had a required class in one of the -ologies. I vaguely remember that my classmates and I had to learn about pigeons, rats, and people who would make decisions that struck me as off the wall. The professor was named after a Scottish family from the Highlands. I do recall looking up the name and finding that it meant “crooked nose.” But the nose, as nice as it was, was nothing to the bed springs the good professor suspended from a second story window. I asked him, “What’s the purpose of the bed springs?” (None of the other students in the class cared, but I found the sight interesting.) His reply was, “I am using it as an antenna.” Okay, that is one example of PhD-level intelligence. I have encountered others, but I will not regale you with are somewhat idiosyncratic behaviors.
The illustration demonstrates the common sense approach to problem solving. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Chugging away on Recall and security over the holiday. Yep, I bet you are.
Why am I thinking about a story about bedsprings suspend from a second story window? I just read “ChatGPT Now Has PhD Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It.” The write up states:
ChatGPT has become indispensable to plagiarists and spambots worldwide. Now, OpenAI is thrilled to introduce ChatGPT 5.0, the most advanced version of the popular virtual assistant to date. With groundbreaking improvements, GPT-5 is like having a doctor of philosophy right at your fingertips.
The write up (in a humorous vein I really hope) identifies some characteristics of the next big thing from Sam AI-Man, the Apple partner he hopes. The article suggests that ChatGPT 5 can cherish a saloon mug with this snappy phrase printed on the container:
Suck it up, liver.
No, I don’t want the mug, nor have I abused my liver as an undergraduate. I actually enjoyed spending time in the so-called university’s library.
The write up includes an short commentary about the ethical concerns or guardrails Sam AI-Man has on the Information Highway populated with smart vehicles and presumably less smart humans who are confident the zeros and ones don’t get scrambled:
Numerous questions have arisen regarding the ethics and legality of training ChatGPT on copyrighted text data without permission. In this latest version, however, reliance on authors’ intellectual property has been dramatically reduced. While GPT-5 started training from a knowledge base of millions of texts, it got around to reading only Frankenstein, plus maybe half of a Donna Haraway book. It basically bluffed its way through prelims by talking about “embodiment” a lot.
I get the Mary Shelly reference. But Donna Haraway forced me to ask Claude Sonnet 3.5, “Please, explain Donna Haraway’s contribution to ethical discourse.” Here’s what I received from the smart system competing with Sam AI-Man’s presumably smarter system:
Here’s Donna Haraway’s contribution to ethical discourse in three sentences:
- Donna Haraway challenged traditional ideas about what it means to be human by introducing the concept of a “cyborg” – a blend of human and machine.
- She argued that the lines between nature and culture, human and animal, and physical and non-physical are not as clear as we think, which forces us to rethink our ethical responsibilities.
- Her work encourages us to consider how technology and science affect our understanding of ourselves and our relationships with other living things, pushing us to develop new ethical frameworks for our changing world.
Thank you, Claude Sonnet 3.5! I have stated that my IQ score pegs me in the “Dumb Cod” percentile. I think Ms. Haraway is into the Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk concept space. I know I am looking forward to nanodevices able to keep me alive for many, many years. I want to poke fun at smart software, and I quite like to think about PhD level software.
To close, I want to quote the alleged statement of a very smart person who could not remember if OpenAI used YouTube-type content to train ChatGPT. (Hey, even crooked nose remembered that he suspended the bed springs to function like an antenna.) The CTO of OpenAI allegedly said:
“If you look at the trajectory of improvement, systems like GPT-3 were maybe toddler-level intelligence… and then systems like GPT-4 are more like smart high-schooler intelligence. And then, in the next couple of years, we’re looking at PhD intelligence…” — Open AI CTO Mira Murati, in an interview with Dartmouth Engineering
I wonder if a person without a PhD can recognize “PhD intelligence”? Sure. Why not? It’s marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2024
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