Azeem Azhar

Today's LLMs easily pass the Turing test.

And we've already started to see some media outlets having to retract stories that they now realize weren't written by freelancers, but were actually written by people using AI systems end to end.

So today we don't use the Turing test as a test for machine intelligence.

We have shifted the goalposts.

We measure AI's performance against a series of increasingly complex benchmarks.

This effect of shifting goalposts has been noticed since the 1970s.

Rodney Brooks, who is a professor of computer science and robotics at MIT, puts it very, very pithily.

He says,

Every time we figure out a piece of this artificial intelligence, it stops being magical.

People say, hey, that's just computation.

And that's what's happening.

We're moving these goalposts.

I think that if you took the capabilities of GPT-5 and dropped them into that 2014 Turing test challenge at the Royal Institution, people would have had their minds absolutely blown.

But now it's just seen as a small improvement from something like 03.

Now, the second paradox is the negative space paradox.

Now, that sounds all fancy, but it is more subtle.

You've probably lived through it, experienced it yourself.

I mean, consider flying.

When people first got access to transatlantic flights in the 1930s, it was really remarkable.

No more five-day steaming across the Atlantic.