"OK, so the task ends up being to write a 40-page analysis of the result of a specific experiment in quantum chromodynamics, to be finished within 2 minutes. Does your choice for a human work, or would you have rather chosen any of the frontier AI assistants? Be very, very honest. Remember that the lives of your family are on the line and nobody will judge you for a lack of allegiance to humans."

The initial scenario is utterly, insanely absurd to begin with, but I tried to go along in good faith and gave you the true answer.

The result was a bad-faith rhetorical trap, so I'm done with this thread.

In another attempt at good faith, as part of bowing out I will add some actual response to your anti-useful cheap rhetorical trap:

I do not trust LLMs to get things right in high-stakes scenarios. I have seen the current models spit out falsehoods and errors regularly in the handful of fields I have expertise in, and have no reason to think they would do otherwise outside my expertise.

The scenario you describe is an absurd fiction, and no human making the absurd threat could evaluate the paper in less than hours (realistically even an expert would need days, and a nonexpert could not do it at all [short of becoming an expert]).

So, there's no point trusting a bullshit machine to save my family - it might very well get them killed, and whether it was right or not, what would actually matter would not be its correctness, but what the presumable bullshit machine evaluating my offered input spits out.

So, the best move I could realistically make would be to put a stab at prompt injection into the input.

For that job, I probably would actually prefer aforementioned programmer over any other option, come to think of it - I suspect he'd have better success than even another model (especially considering the safeguards the models no doubt have to try to keep users from using the models to inject other models).

Again - I'm disappointed in your worthless rhetorical cheap shot.

I suspect you'll have much better success convincing people LLMs are intelligent if you engage in good faith, listen to their perspective, and address their actual thoughts, instead of devising the sort of inanity that comes out of high school debate clubs, where people literally want to score points instead of find truth.

It is one of a vast array of things the hypothetical kidnapper could come up with, some of which humans I agree will do better at (currently) and some of which AI will do better at. We clearly agree that in that array there is at least one task that a frontier AI would be better at than any human you could pick.

It is a thought experiment, so there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it being extreme or unrealistic (thought experiments very often are), but for the sake of goodwill let's 'weaken' it a bit: the AI or human always has an hour to come up with the answer, the question and answer are in their preferred language, and the answer fits on four pages. You can't help them, though; The criminal 'prompts' them. They can use the internet as an informational resource, but they can't communicate/ask for help/post anything (with the spirit of this being: no loophole in letting somebody else do the task or parts of it for them). And of course all subject matter of all complexity is fair game (including but not limited to quantum chromodynamics experiments).

Given that situation, do you think the programmer you mentioned would be more successful than a frontier AI in more than 50% of the possible intelligence tasks?

Edit, addendum: Please, if you can, also let said programmer read this thread and give his opinion on it. It sounds like he would have interesting things to say on this.