Key Points
His best-known projects involved analyzing the ways in which Facebook (now Meta) gained a shockingly deep understanding of its users from all the times they clicked like on the platform..
Kosinski put LLMs to the test and now says his experiments show that in GPT-4 in particular, a theory of mind-like ability may have emerged as an unintended by-product of LLMs improving language skills They signify the advent of more powerful and socially skilled AI...
In response to a preprint Kosinski had published on Arxiv in early 2023, a group of AI researchers wrote a paper suggesting he was actually observing a Clever Hans, referring to that famous early 20th century horse that people were tricked into thinking could do math and keep track of a calendar..
Also, some other papers have been published recently that seem to bolster his claims, including one in Nature Human Behavior that found that both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, while not succeeding at every theory-of-mind task, exhibited impressive performance on some of them, and exceeded human level on others..
In an email to me, the lead author, James Strachan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, doesnt claim that LLMs have fully mastered theory of mind, but says his team did refute the cheating charge..
