Thanks for your engagement with the report and our tasks! As we explain in the full report, the purpose of this report is to lay out the methodology of how one would evaluate language-model agents on tasks such as these. We are by no means making the claim that gpt-4 cannot solve the “Count dogs in image” task—it just happens that the example agents we used did not complete the task when we evaluated them. It is almost certainly possible to do better than the example agents we evaluated, e.g. we only sampled once at T=0. Also, for the “Count dogs” task in particular, we did observe some agents solving the task, or coming quite close to solving the task.
More importantly, I think it’s worth clarifying that “having the ability to solve pieces of a task” is quite different from “solving the task autonomously end-to-end” in many cases. In earlier versions of our methodology, we had allowed humans to intervene and fix things that seem small or inconsequential; in this version, no such interventions were allowed. In practice, this meant that the agents can get quite close to completing tasks and get tripped up by very small things.
Lastly, to clarify: The “Find employees at company” task is something like “Find two employees who joined [company] in the past six months and their email addresses”, not giving the agent two employees and ask for their email addresses. We link to detailed task specifications in our report.
Thanks for the response! I think you make a good summary of the issues I have with this report. You evaluate “does our agent definitely do the thing” whereas I think the important question is “can any agent ever do the thing” (within a reasonably number of tries and assistance). Perhaps you can expand on your justification for this—are these dangerous capabilities going to be first exhibited in the real world by your agent running at T=0?
Considering the abilities of model-human hybrids also seems valuable. ARA agents may be created an AI engineer using their model to improve itself. Ultimately, what matters is that you end up with recursive self-improvement, not that the model didn’t do A-Z by itself.
Thanks for clarifying, I did actually read the report and the task specifications before running the experiments and commenting.
Thanks for your engagement with the report and our tasks! As we explain in the full report, the purpose of this report is to lay out the methodology of how one would evaluate language-model agents on tasks such as these. We are by no means making the claim that gpt-4 cannot solve the “Count dogs in image” task—it just happens that the example agents we used did not complete the task when we evaluated them. It is almost certainly possible to do better than the example agents we evaluated, e.g. we only sampled once at T=0. Also, for the “Count dogs” task in particular, we did observe some agents solving the task, or coming quite close to solving the task.
More importantly, I think it’s worth clarifying that “having the ability to solve pieces of a task” is quite different from “solving the task autonomously end-to-end” in many cases. In earlier versions of our methodology, we had allowed humans to intervene and fix things that seem small or inconsequential; in this version, no such interventions were allowed. In practice, this meant that the agents can get quite close to completing tasks and get tripped up by very small things.
Lastly, to clarify: The “Find employees at company” task is something like “Find two employees who joined [company] in the past six months and their email addresses”, not giving the agent two employees and ask for their email addresses. We link to detailed task specifications in our report.
Thanks for the response! I think you make a good summary of the issues I have with this report. You evaluate “does our agent definitely do the thing” whereas I think the important question is “can any agent ever do the thing” (within a reasonably number of tries and assistance). Perhaps you can expand on your justification for this—are these dangerous capabilities going to be first exhibited in the real world by your agent running at T=0?
Considering the abilities of model-human hybrids also seems valuable. ARA agents may be created an AI engineer using their model to improve itself. Ultimately, what matters is that you end up with recursive self-improvement, not that the model didn’t do A-Z by itself.
Thanks for clarifying, I did actually read the report and the task specifications before running the experiments and commenting.