Perhaps thinking about IQ conflates too things: correctness and speed. For individual humans, these seem correlated: people with higher IQ are usually able to get more correct results, more quickly.
But it becomes relevant when talking about groups of people: Whether a group of average people is better than a genius, depends on the nature of the task. The genius will be better at doing novel research. The group of normies will be better at doing lots of trivial paperwork.
Currently, the AIs seem comparable to having an army of normies on steroids.
The performance of a group of normies (literal or metaphorical) can sometimes be improved by error checking. For example, if you have them solve mathematical problems, they will probably make a lot of errors; adding more normies would allow you to solve more problems, but the fraction of correct solutions would remain the same. But if you give them instructions how the verify the solutions, you could increase the correctness (at a cost of slowing them down somewhat). Similarly, an LLM can give me hallucinated solutions to math / programming problems, but that is less of a concern if I can verify the solutions in Lean / using unit tests, and reject the incorrect ones; and who knows, maybe trying again will result in a better solution. (In a hypothetical extreme case, an army of monkeys with typewriters could produce Shakespeare, if we had a 100% reliable automatic verifier of their outputs.)
So it seems to me, the question is how much we can compensate for the errors caused by “lower IQ”. Depending on the answer, that’s how long we have to wait until the AIs become that intelligent.
More important is “size of a team of humans” vs “peak capabilities of a team of humans” (or maybe sum of the cubes of their IQs?)
A given person thinking faster than average is more equivalent to a multiplier on the number of people of exactly that intelligence you have.
(Of course, if you could radically increase brain speed, I would expect IQ to increase rather than remain constant, but that isn’t yet an option for humans).
Perhaps thinking about IQ conflates too things: correctness and speed. For individual humans, these seem correlated: people with higher IQ are usually able to get more correct results, more quickly.
But it becomes relevant when talking about groups of people: Whether a group of average people is better than a genius, depends on the nature of the task. The genius will be better at doing novel research. The group of normies will be better at doing lots of trivial paperwork.
Currently, the AIs seem comparable to having an army of normies on steroids.
The performance of a group of normies (literal or metaphorical) can sometimes be improved by error checking. For example, if you have them solve mathematical problems, they will probably make a lot of errors; adding more normies would allow you to solve more problems, but the fraction of correct solutions would remain the same. But if you give them instructions how the verify the solutions, you could increase the correctness (at a cost of slowing them down somewhat). Similarly, an LLM can give me hallucinated solutions to math / programming problems, but that is less of a concern if I can verify the solutions in Lean / using unit tests, and reject the incorrect ones; and who knows, maybe trying again will result in a better solution. (In a hypothetical extreme case, an army of monkeys with typewriters could produce Shakespeare, if we had a 100% reliable automatic verifier of their outputs.)
So it seems to me, the question is how much we can compensate for the errors caused by “lower IQ”. Depending on the answer, that’s how long we have to wait until the AIs become that intelligent.
In fact, speed and accuracy in humans are at least somewhat mechanistically different
More important is “size of a team of humans” vs “peak capabilities of a team of humans” (or maybe sum of the cubes of their IQs?) A given person thinking faster than average is more equivalent to a multiplier on the number of people of exactly that intelligence you have. (Of course, if you could radically increase brain speed, I would expect IQ to increase rather than remain constant, but that isn’t yet an option for humans).