We’re awaiting the release of OpenAI’s o3 model later this month. Its performance is impressive on very hard benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified, Frontier Math and the ARC AGI benchmark (discussed previously in this blog).

And yet at the same time some behaviors of the frontier AI models are very concerning.

Their performance on assorted math exams is outstanding, but they make mistakes doing simple arithmetic, like wrongly multiplying numbers that are a few digits long. Performance of the o1 preview model on the difficult Putnam math exam is excellent but drops precipitously under simple changes like renaming constants and variables in the problem statement.

Similarly, when o1 is applied to a planning benchmark expressed in standardized language, it performs well, but accuracy falls apart when applied to a mathematically equivalent planning problem in a different domain. And also, a given AI model applied to the simple ROT13 cipher can have wildly different performance based on the value of the cipher key, suggesting the models don’t really understand the algorithm.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, . . .

What is going on here?

For years now, some have made claims of “human-level performance” for various deep learning algorithms. And as soon as one party starts making claims like this, it’s hard for the others to resist doing the same.

The confusion is that, from a certain point of view, the claim of “human-level” is true—but the definition of “human-level” is fraught.

Here, “human-level” is taken to mean achievement of some high score on a benchmark set, ostensibly exceeding some human performance measure on the same benchmark. However, a single AI model can vary wildly in capability across behaviors—“smart” compared to humans in some ways, “dumb” in others.

For humans, test-taking is a proxy for measuring a range of skills and abilities. And even for humans it is not always an accurate proxy. A person can perform very well on academic tests and very poorly on the job, or vice versa.

And the capability ratios for AI models are very different still, in ways we don’t fully understand. So, outscoring humans on a software engineering benchmark doesn’t mean the AI has the whole panoply of coding skills, decision-making abilities, software architecture design savvy, etc., needed to be a competent software engineer.

It’s no surprise that recent articles (below) show a growing perception of the limitations of AI benchmarks as currently conceived.

Ways forward

Perhaps we should consider developing requirements like the following before claiming human-level reasoning performance of an AI model:

• It should be able to “explain its work” at any level of detail to another human (just like a human can), in a way that that human can understand.
• It should be able to give answers without “hallucinating” or “confabulating” (yes, humans can hallucinate too, but most occupations would not be well-served by an employee who hallucinates on the job).
• It should be able to reliably and consistently (100% of the time) do things that we routinely expect a human or computer to do accurately (like add or multiply two numbers accurately, for things like filling out tax returns or doing engineering calculations to build an airplane).
• It should be frank and honest in assessing its level of certainty about an answer it gives (no gaslighting).
• It should be able to solve a trivial perturbation of a given problem with the same ease as the original problem (to the same extent that a human can).
• As someone has said, it should be able to do, without specific training, what a 5 year old can do without specific training.
• This one sounds good, from Emmett Shear: “AGI [artificial general intelligence] is the ability to generalize [without special training by a human] to an adversarially chosen new benchmark.”

AI models are fantastic and amazing tools—and best used when one has eyes wide open about their limitations.

Have you had problems with AI model performance? If so, please share in the comments.

References

Rethinking AI benchmarks: A new paper challenges the status quo of evaluating artificial intelligence, https://venturebeat.com/ai/rethinking-ai-benchmarks-a-new-paper-challenges-the-status-quo-of-evaluating-artificial-intelligence/

Rethink reporting of evaluation results in AI, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf6369, https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/198211/

Inadequacies of Large Language Model Benchmarks in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence, https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09880

Everyone Is Judging AI by These Tests. But Experts Say They’re Close to Meaningless, https://themarkup.org/artificial-intelligence/2024/07/17/everyone-is-judging-ai-by-these-tests-but-experts-say-theyre-close-to-meaningless

Why we must rethink AI benchmarks, https://bdtechtalks.com/2021/12/06/ai-benchmarks-limitations/

AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark, https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15366

BetterBench: Assessing AI Benchmarks, Uncovering Issues, and Establishing Best Practices, https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12990

Goodhart’s Law states that when a proxy for some value becomes the target of optimization pressure, the proxy will cease to be a good proxy.

The post Can AI models reason like a human? first appeared on John D. Cook.