This Gadget Pokes Fun at Cutting-Edge AI Models for Intelligence Slip-Ups
“This Tool Probes Frontier AI Models for Lapses in Intelligence”
“An AI model is only as good as the data it’s fed. And in many cases, these AI models are shockingly deficient in common sense. Now, a team of researchers at OpenAI has developed a litmus test, of sorts, to probe these models for any glaring gaps in reasoning.” It seems that our silicon-inhabited friends still have a bit of learning left to do. Yes, we’re talking artificial intelligence and the apparent “lapses in intelligence.” A few bright sparks at OpenAI have concocted a test to catch these thinking blunders, somewhat of a brain teaser for your AI neighborhood pals.
So, what’s causing the hiccup? As it turns out, teaching machines to think, at least in a human sense, is no walk in the park. The swanky language model that OpenAI unveiled last year, coined “GPT-3”, is designed to generate paragraphs of text that mimic the coherence and style of human writing. Despite its seeming verbal wizardry, it is not uncommon for GPT-3 to infer that a banana is a great tool to open a wine bottle. Hmmm? Something seems off, doesn’t it?
Dubbed as “AI’s common sense problem”, these laughable errors have a deeper root than the absurd ideas they frequently concoct. The issues lay in the lack of context understanding and the lack of knowledge about the physical world. Ironically enough, these shiny toys built to mimic humans fail to grasp the one thing every toddler knows; bananas are for eating, not for opening wine bottles.
To conquer these common-sense conundrums, the OpenAI researchers have built a system to measure how robustly a language model can answer questions. A clever way, indeed, to pinpoint exactly where our somewhat dense AI companions are going off-track. This raises the crucial point that AI systems are, at the end of the day, only as good as the data they crunch on.
Humanity has managed to take a computer – a glorified abacus – and teach it to write poetry, do complex mathematics, even play video games, albeit with a few amusing hiccups along the way. While there is no doubt about the potential AI platforms hold, it is clear their cognitive capabilities often could do with a bit of sharpening up. Bottom line is, forget about robot overlords for now, they’re still busy figuring out what to do with a banana.