AI is as Intelligent as a Four-Year-Old Kid

Computer can already beat us in many tasks. Complicated calculation, processing speed and chess, to name a few. However, generally speaking, you’re still likely to be more intelligent than the most sophisticated Artificial Intelligent system. Researchers at MIT have tried to test the general intelligence of an AI System and found out it’s as smart as a four-year-old child.

The researchers tested the AI with the preschool variant of the Wechsler Test (WPPSI), a test commonly used in US schools. The questions had to be modified for the computer to make it understand what was being asked. When doing a test designed for four-year-old kids the AI got an average score. When the difficulty of the test was increased to the level of five to seven-year-old it scored insufficient.

The AI turned out to be very good at finding similarities, involving questions like: "Pen and pencil are both…?" and vocabulary: "What is a house?". When it was asked informational questions such as "Where can you find a penguin?" it performed average. The most difficult part of the test seemed to be word reasoning and comprehension.

One of the questions from the comprehension subset was: "Why do people shake hands?". The computer replied: "epileptic fit". This wasn’t the answer the researchers were looking for, but it could still make sense. It could also be that the computer tried to make a joke and the researchers failed to spot it. Perhaps the AI didn’t understand IQ tests aren’t the right situation in which to make jokes.

The future will bring more and more clever AI, as researchers have just started feeding their new learning-driven AI with huge amounts of data. Studies predict that by 2029 AI will become smarter than humans. Maybe then we will realize that trying to compare human and artificial intelligence it’s a silly exercise. Possibly we will start expressing their capabilities in a separate Artificial Intelligence Quotient (AIQ) instead of human IQ.

Source: BBC. Image via Shutterstock