Nate Silver: evaluation

Transcript context

…Those will work in less than a year, I think. There’s an agentic model now from OpenAI. This is where I get to rough AGI versus superintelligence. I am less convinced that we’re going to have some intelligence explosion than I would have been maybe . . . I don’t think I was ever convinced of it, but this emergent superintelligence, where you train it on relatively simple data and it extrapolates beyond the data set. I think they do reason. Sometimes I think they’re quite smart, and I no longer am bashful about saying, “Oh, ChatGPT thinks this.” I used to avoid that term, think. But there’s a big gap between approximate general intelligence for desk jobs, and then superintelligence on the one hand, or AGI for physical labor on the other hand. I think people are much too quick to make that leap. I think the Math Olympiad, in part because maybe the answers are somewhere latent in the training data, but even if they’re not, if you try to solve, what’s a Lucas critique? Whatever else, right? There’s a version of that, I think, for AI models. My intuition is that if you took five superforecasters and just had them write a five-page prompt for GPT-5, which will be out this summer, that we’d be there already. I don’t think it would be superintelligence. You could say it’s not AGI. But the human superforecasters, they’re not that impressive. They’re not Einsteins. They just have good methods, and they’re disciplined.…

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