Arguing that LLMs spontaneously evolve new capabilities outside of their training set (being able to naturally interpret weights and manipulate them to change their function) is a completely different proposition from being able to pattern-match Pac Man really fast from a pseudo-graphical representation (which is what they actually do here).

It's like ChatGPT coming up with a brand new brownie recipe that's surprisingly good vs. coming up with a working design for a cold fusion reactor.

Yeah the brownie is cool, but it's not that cool.

If faster intelligence was “groundbreaking” we would still be worshipping pocket calculators.

I'm not trying to downplay it, it's cool that LLMs can do this, but I feel like the discussion around genAI these days tend to quickly devolve into one of two extremes: complete dismissal (stochastic parrots) or near-AI-psychosis (LLMs are god machines that our puny human brains can't hope to comprehend).

In this particular instance, I also think that at the end of the day it's almost downplaying the capabilities of LLMs: they can reverse-engineer full modern videogames, of course they're capable of recognizing a simplified version of Breakout, even in weight form! It's barely newsworthy at this point, we know LLMs can do that stuff and so much more.

You are incorrect about the iq tests though, so everything else that depends on that falls over.

Some things you may get by looking longer, some things you just have to be shown, and only after being shown, maybe you can at least understand and re-use, but would never come up with from first principles and no hints or prior exposure.

How could I know that? There has already been essentially infinite normal-man-hours since people have started thinking, even when you remove all the people uninterested in doing anything but surviving. Today especially with the population in the billions and all of them having gobs of leisure time they never used to have. And yet we still have not solved much of anything that we know is out there to be solved, and still only an exceptionally rare genius once in a blue moon develops something new.

If mere time was the same, we have already had it, so why aren't we immortal omnipotent energy beings? Why do we still have colds?

Working time alone is a productive strategy for many problems. A machine that can brute force all possible chess moves beats the most genius human player, yet isn't intelligent at all, or rather, requires no intelligence at all. That machine will produce the exact same results either fast or slow depending on how much hardware you give it, and in humans, the genius player produces their answer faster.

But that's no more meaningful than observing that humans often turn simple mechanical cranks, and electric motors do to, and concluding that there is no ultimately significant difference.

Humans can spot patterns in data, and machines can spot patterns in data. Genius humans can do it faster and machines can do it even faster. But that is still just a simple task like pedalling a bicycle or calculating, that a human can do if they choose, but does not require a human and isn't any part of what defines human or intelligence or sentience.

Being mystified by that is like being mystified that an mp3 player said "hello" to you.

The fact that for those tasks, low capacity over longer time can usually produce the same result as more capacity over a shorter time means nothing.

Consider also, today lots of people have both lots of free time and a high interest in solving problems, and the most genius people that ever lived are actually only a little bit more capable than the average in absolute terms (which is probably where you get the feeling that more working time is the same as more ability), so where are all the free time hobby Einsteins?. There should be countless people coming up with new theories of relativity (that actually hold water and predict experiments) simply because they spent 5 years on something Einstein did in a month. Countless people have 5 years to plug away at things like that, and they do, and have been forever. There is some of that in the sense that there is a lot of tedious work being done that produces useful results, but not new insights.

AI's can now do some of that same tedious work only faster, except they are still strictly worse than the most average human because they can't decide what to work on, why to work on it, or judge the quality or usefullness or point of the result. They produce something but they don't produce understanding.