Your true average human is someone like your barista at Starbuck's. Try giving them a good math problem, or logic puzzle, or leetcode problem if you need some reminding of the standard reasoning capabilities of our species. LLMs cannot beat the best humans at practically anything, but average humans? Average humans are a much softer target than this thread seems to think.

I think it would be fairly easy to prove or disprove that 'AI as it is today knows more about any subject than 99% of HN'. But knowledge alone does not translate into intelligence and that's the problem: we don't have a really hard definition of what intelligence really is. There are many reasons for that (such as that it would require us to reconsider some of our past actions), but the fact remains.

So until we really once and for all nail down what intelligence is you get this god-of-the-gaps like problem where everytime we find something that looks and feels truly intelligent by yesterday's standards that intelligence will be crammed into a slightly smaller space excluding the thing that just became possible.

The rate-of-change is a factor here. Arguably the current rate of change is very high compared to with two decades ago, but compared to three years ago it feels as if we're already leveling off and we're more focused on tooling and infrastructure than on intelligence itself.

Intelligence may not actually have a proper definition at all, it seems to be an emergent phenomenon rather than something that you engineer for and there may well be many pathways to intelligence and many different kinds of intelligence.

What gets me about AI so far is that it can be amazing one minute and so incredibly stupid the next that it is cringe worthy. It gives me an idiot/savant kind of vibe rather than that it feels like an actual intelligent party. If it were really intelligent I would expect it to be able to learn as much or more from the interaction and to be able to have a conversation with one party where it learns something useful to then be able to immediately apply that new bit of knowledge in all the other ones.

Humans don't need to be taught the same facts over and over again, though it may help with long term retention. We are able to reason about things based on very limited information and while we get stuff wrong - and frequently so - we usually also know quite precisely where the limits of our knowledge are, even if we don't always act like it.

To me it is one of those 'I'll know it when I see it' things, and without insulting anybody, including the barista's at Starbucks, I think it is perfectly possible to have a discussion about this and to accept that average humans all have different skills and specialties and that some people work at Starbucks because they want to and others because they have to, it does not say anything per-se about their intelligence or lack thereof. At the same time you can be IQ 140 but still dumber than a Starbucks barista on what it takes to make someone feel comfortable and how to make coffee.

Completely disagree. Inability to handle specific math or CS is a matter of training and experience not reasoning and intelligence. The barista is quite capable at reasoning and learning feats the LLMs aren't close to