[LINK] OpenAI’s o3 Model: Breakthrough or Breakdown?

[David]

On Friday, 25 April 2025 12:43:03 AEST Antony Barry wrote:

> Reviewers were wowed by its [OpenAI’s o3 Model] “agentic” behavior and its seemingly superhuman vision and reasoning. Yet these strengths come with concerning caveats.  Despite its advancements, o3 hallucinates more than twice as often as its predecessor and only achieves 48.3% accuracy in financial analysis.  This dichotomy — cutting-edge progress paired with unreliability — exemplifies what experts are calling AI’s “jagged frontier.”

This seems to me to demonstrate a fundamental issue with AI machines: they are still very large correlation processors but have not been developed far enough to distinguish "empirical correlations" and logical rules.  Thus "2 plus 2 usually makes 4" is an empirical correlation, but "2+2=4" in an appropriate mathematical context is a logical rule.  (And we understand "He added 2 and 2 and got 5" isn't an appropriate context!) 

Making these machines ever bigger & faster will increase the rate of so-called hallucinations, and tryiing to fix the problem by filtering with hard logic is rather self-defeating.  So how do humans manage the feat so easily, and apparently with so little energy input?

Leaving aside the energy question for a moment, the human neocortex has been evolving into its modern form for (say) 200-million years.  It has also been physically evolving and absorbing "training" data for that time.  Most importantly, humans are sentient beings so we actually experience the world directly, we're not just machines processing abstract symbols though we can do that too, and we're organised into social groups so we can educate one another.  Accumulated physical evolution and associated "training" seem to me to be primary, not processing bandwidth.

Scientific American ran an article recently on the estimated bit-rate of the human brain:

QUOTE:
People often feel that their inner thoughts and feelings are much richer than they are capable of expressing in real time. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is so bothered by what he calls this “bandwidth problem,” in fact, that one of his long-term goals is to create an interface that lets the human brain communicate directly with a comp­uter, unencumbered by the slow speed of speaking or writing.

If Musk succeeded, he would probably be disappointed. According to recent research published in Neuron, human beings remember, make decisions and imagine things at a fixed, excruciatingly slow speed of about 10 bits per second. In contrast, human sensory systems gather data at about one billion bits per second.

This biological paradox, highlighted in the new study, probably contributes to the false feeling that our mind can engage in seemingly infinite thoughts simultaneously—a phenomenon the researchers deem “the Musk illusion.” 
UNQUOTE

_David Lochrin_