Azeem Azhar

This model was met with mixed emotions.

I called it evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Many people were a bit underwhelmed by it.

Some were positively cross.

Here's the thing.

GPT-5 could never have impressed us.

It's because it falls between two paradoxes of progress.

Paradoxes that have played out time and time again through history and they do give us a clue to how we're going to react to ever improving artificial intelligence.

To understand this first paradox, we have to go back to the early days of computing.

Actually, back to 1950, before the term artificial intelligence had been coined.

We'll go to Alan Turing.

He was doing all that breakthrough work in cryptography and the theory of computation.

And he came up with this test for machine intelligence that later on got known as the Turing test.

The test was reasonably simple, right?

If the output of a computer system, a machine, was indistinguishable to other humans from the outputs from other humans, you've got a machine that is exhibiting some type of thinking.

And the Turing test became the thing people measured towards humans.

It persuaded judges at Britain's Royal Institution that it was human years before ChatGPT

And so we end up in this world where we say, well, it used deception.

It's a parlor trick.

This isn't a good test.