I keep seeing headlines about AI systems passing various tests or solving complex problems, and it made me wonder where they would actually score on a standard IQ test.
Can you even measure AI intelligence the same way you measure human intelligence? Would something like GPT or other language models score high across the board, or would they have weird gaps in their profiles?
I’m also curious if different AI systems would have different “IQ scores” based on what they were trained to do, or if the whole concept just doesn’t apply to artificial intelligence at all.
AI would have a super uneven profile. It could probably ace matrix reasoning and verbal analogies, but then completely bomb on practical reasoning tasks that require real world knowledge. Like it might solve complex math but not understand why you can’t fit a ladder through a door horizontally. The concept of a single IQ score doesn’t really work when the “intelligence” is so specialized.
I’ve read that some researchers tried giving AI systems IQ tests and the results were all over the place depending on the test format. Text based stuff? AI crushes it. But anything requiring visual spatial reasoning or understanding of physical objects gets weird fast. It’s less about “what’s the IQ” and more about recognizing that human and artificial intelligence are just fundamentally different things.
I’m wondering, why do we need it to have a score so badly? IQ was invented to sort human children into human classrooms. Using it on AI is like using a thermometer to measure wind speed. The instrument will give you a number, but that number doesn’t mean what you think it means.
You can’t line them up on an IQ spectrum any more than you can line up smell, color, and sound on a “sensory intensity” scale. The question assumes a common dimension that doesn’t exist. It’s not even an unequal profile like someone who’s better at math than reading. This is savant-level performance in some areas coexisting with absences that don’t even register as “low intelligence” (more like missing senses). A human with this profile would be neurologically impossible. But for AI, it’s just Tuesday.