Episode 5: How do we assess intelligence?

When it comes to assessing intelligence, people have all kinds of tests — the SAT, IQ tests, and so on. There’s controversy over how fairly these tests really measure human intelligence, but at the very least, we know that they correlate with some general reasoning skills when people take them. That assumption breaks down when we try to assess intelligence in non-humans. What does it mean when a large language model passes an intelligence test meant for humans? Does it actually have the same reasoning skills that a human does, or is it doing something else? In today’s episode, with guests Erica Cartmill and Ellie Pavlick, we investigate the best ways to assess intelligence in non-humans, whether animals or machines.