But you have to acknowledge how uneven the playing field is. The AI has read every book that's ever been written, and can spend hours of compute time in a few seconds.

I think if a person had those same advantages (e.g. could spend 5 hours thinking about what to say next) we could all hold outstanding conversations, or if we had read every book ever written I think many of us could write a very popular book, if we could read every singe company's P&L statement in a few seconds we could invest better than an index fund.

What I'm pointing out here is that these models appear to be intelligent when they really are simply unimagineably knowledgeable. When you drop the time-constraints it starts to become more and more apparent that human intelligence scales better with time than AI does (much in the same way AI can burp out tons of code but make your codebase entirely illegible within a matter of months).

Perhaps to simplify: my notion of intelligence is how much can you deduce with a constant set of starting context

> I think if a person had those same advantages (e.g. could spend 5 hours thinking about what to say next) we could all hold outstanding conversations, or if we had read every book ever written I think many of us could write a very popular book, if we could read every singe company's P&L statement in a few seconds we could invest better than an index fund

I’m not so sure of that - to get average outcomes in these fields it’s a matter of time, to get above average or extraordinary, you need talent/intelligence/taste.

And the bar the parent set is at extraordinary.

So now the bar is not only to be at the level of a human, but to achieve it without the natural advantages of being a machine, while still having the disadvantages (lack of embodiment, etc.).

If you went back to when I started working on AI stuff 20+ years ago and described the capabilities of GPT-3 to people, the overwhelming majority would say it's a form of AGI. It's incredible how fast and far the bar moves.

I would be willing to bet that any human for which we spend $100billion - $3 trillion (depending if you want to count single corporations or global totals) on in an attempt to make them as capable as possible would be able to reach all of those levels.

I think I view humanity fairly positively, but I admit I would gladly take the other side of that bet

A quick search suggests that the most expensive education in the world is something like $100k.

So like you spend a million times more than that and you still think you're not going to see some results?

> A quick search suggests that the most expensive education in the world is something like $100k.

I have a kid in an American university right now, and a quick search of my bank account statements confirms that there are far more expensive educations in the world.

Wow, an increasing number of US universities are going over $100k per year. That's a crazy amount. That's more than enough to hire an entire person.

Some results, sure.

But that list is extremely ambitious. Write a best seller, make a popular game, come up with a truly novel theory, consistently outtrade index funds.

That's top 0.001% human stuff, I don't think you can take just any person and get there through education alone, it takes extreme talent and dedication. There's also diminishing returns when spending on education, it doesn't just improve linearly.

The marginal return on education spending decreases fairly quickly, but obviously becomes zero at the point by which there are not enough hours in the day/year/decade to cover every single topic that humans know about - no matter the talent or resources available to the student.

except you are missing the one versus many argument here. sure we could make one human much smarter, could we make endless copies with the same intelligence? no

For $100 billion we could pay ivy-league level tuition for a million people. You don’t think investing that much in education would yield some good research or companies?

That's not what the parent comment said though

> any human for which we spend $100billion - $3 trillion...would be able to reach all of those levels

You'd get rapidly diminishing to zero returns after the cost of university a few times over. Every dollar past that would produce no performance gain beyond that.

Are you imagining artificial augmentation somehow? Purely through tutors or training programs we seem pretty limited. Otherwise billionaires (or even multimillionaires) could have far more consistently successful kids.

Don't the children of the wealthy famously have a tendency to be successful? Or have I badly misinterpreted the last several thousand years of human history.

To really drill down into that I would think you would need to figure out how many millionair children get tutored vs how many get spoiled.

Successful, sure.

Gold medal Olympic athletes who are also brain surgeons AND astronauts, no.