Scientists construct human mind-mimicking A.I.

To better understand human cognitiion, warts and all

Excerpt: "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.