Sam Altman claims knowing what questions to ask trumps raw intelligence as AI advances — Users struggle to realize Copilot and ChatGPT's full poten...

[Windows Central]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently claimed that AI is reducing the importance of raw intelligence, as figuring out what questions to ask gains precedence.

Sam Altman claims knowing what questions to ask trumps raw intelligence as AI advances — Users struggle to realize Copilot and ChatGPT's full poten... : Read more

 

[GraniteStateColin]

One of my favorite lines of all time in movies or TV, is said by Doctor Who, known for both his intelligence and knowledge, "The answers are easy. It's asking the right questions that's hard." (Doctor #4, Tom Baker, if anyone's curious.)

I find the use of the word "intelligence" strange in this article. I would say that knowledge != intelligence. Knowledge is accumulated facts and learned skills. It's mostly a function of training and, for a human, a person's desire to learn and ability to remember. Intelligence is the ability to see or create new things (solutions, jokes, music, military strategy, physics theories, faking out the defense in a new play to get the ball to the basket,...) that didn't previously exist. So, posing the proper queries to AI to get at the knowledge it has would be a form of intelligence.

The AI can have vast knowledge. At the limit, it can equal the accumulated recorded knowledge of all humanity. AI is also good at finding patterns, which is a form of intelligence, but only one. This has been incredibly useful, for example, in predicting protein folding and chemical engineering for materials sciences leapfrogging attempts to actually model molecular interaction by electric charges -- a task like trying to exactly predict the weather months into the future, impossible due to the number of variables and chaotic interactions. AI is able to bypass this using pattern recognition at a scale that the human brain can't do. It's also helping with some cosmological questions where there are slight statistical variations only visible looking at thousands of data points, again beyond human capacity. These are wonderful but are no substitute for the human ability to go BEYOND patterns to imagine things and solutions that have no precedent.

At this point, AI is still just a tool that requires clever humans to ask it the insightful questions, just like the Doctor said. Maybe one day it will go beyond that, but if so, it will be different from the large language models we see today.