To better understand human cognition, scientists trained a large language model on 10 million psychology experiment questions. It now answers questions much like we do.
Companies like OpenAI and Meta are in a race to make something they like to call artificial general intelligence. But for all the money being spent on it, A.G.I. has no settled definition. It’s more of an aspiration to create something indistinguishable from the human mind.
Artificial intelligence today is already doing a lot of things that were once limited to human minds — such as playing championship chess and figuring out the structure of proteins. ChatGPT and other chatbots are crafting language so humanlike that people are falling in love with them.
But for now, artificial intelligence remains very distinguishable from the human kind. Many A.I. systems are good at one thing and one thing only. A grandmaster can drive a car to a chess tournament, but a chess-playing A.I. system is helpless behind the wheel. An A.I. chatbot can sometimes make very simple — and very weird — mistakes, like letting pawns move sideways in chess, an illegal move.
For all these shortcomings, an international team of scientists believe that A.I. systems can help them understand how the human mind works. They have created a ChatGPT-like system that can play the part of a human in a psychological experiment and behave as if it has a human mind. Details about the system, known as Centaur, were published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
In recent decades, cognitive scientists have created sophisticated theories to explain various things that our minds can do: learn, recall memories, make decisions and more. To test these theories, cognitive scientists run experiments to see if human behavior matches a theory’s predictions.
Some theories have fared well on such tests, and can even explain the mind’s quirks. We generally choose certainty over risk, for instance, even if that means forgoing a chance to make big gains. If people are offered $1,000, they will usually take that firm offer rather than make a bet that might, or might not, deliver a much bigger payout.