GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question

Absolutely correct.

We already know this is about self-driving cars. Passing a driver's test was already possible in 2015 or so, but SDCs clearly aren't ready for L5 deployment even today.

There are also a lot of excellent examples of failure modes in object detection benchmarks.

Tests, such as driver's tests or standardized exams, are designed for humans. They make a lot of entirely implicit assumptions about failure modes and gaps in knowledge that are uniquely human. Automated systems work differently. They don't fail in the same way that humans fail, and therefore need different benchmarks.

Designing good benchmarks that probe GPT systems for common failure modes and weaknesses is actually quite difficult. Much more difficult than designing or training these systems, IME.

On topic of the driver's test analogy: I've known people who have passed the test and still said, "I'm don't yet feel ready to drive during rush hour or in downtown Toronto." And then at some point in the future they then recognize that they are ready and wade into trickier situations.

I wonder how self-aware these systems can be? Could ChatGPT be expected to say things like, "I can pass a state bar exam but I'm not ready to be a lawyer because..."

The problem ChatGPT and the other language models currently in the zeitgeist are trying to solve is, "given this sequence of symbols, what is a symbol that is likely to come next, as rated by some random on fiverr.com?"

Turns out that this is sufficient to autocomplete things like written tests.

Such a system is also absolutely capable of coming up with sentences like "I can pass a state bar exam but I'm not ready to be a lawyer because..." - or, indeed, sentences with the opposite meaning.

It would, however, be a mistake to draw any conclusions about the system's actual capabilities and/or modes of failure from the things its outputs mean to the human reader; much the same way that if you have dice with a bunch of words on and you roll "I", "am", "sentient" in that order, this event is not yet evidence for the dice's sentience.