7/29/23

This working note uses Anthropic Claude to summarize the Nature paper General intelligence disentangled via a generality metric for natural and artificial intelligence, which seemed to empirically support the ideas I advocated re. expert generalists in my Medium article **Elon, the Expert Generalist,** and assess correlations between the two to insure I understood them properly. I then use Claude as a research partner to suggest lines of research opened by the analysis.

Please read and summarize this scientific paper:

Here is a summary of the key points from the paper:

• The paper introduces new metrics to measure an agent's capability and generality on a range of tasks.
• Capability refers to the overall performance level or competence of the agent across tasks. It is measured as the area under the agent characteristic curve (ACC), which plots performance as a function of task difficulty.
• Generality refers to how broadly and evenly an agent's capability is distributed across tasks of varying difficulty. It is measured using the spread of the ACC - how compacted the curve is to the left. Higher generality means an agent can perform well up to a certain level of difficulty across tasks.
• These new metrics allow measuring capability and generality at the individual level, independent of population performance.
• The metrics are applied to humans, non-human animals, and AI systems on a diverse set of cognitive and perceptual tasks.
• Results show capability and generality can decouple - specialized systems can have high capability, and vice versa.
• Humans tend to show higher generality than other animals and current AI systems.
• The paper challenges the diminishing returns hypothesis that generality decreases with capability. Experiments do not support this relationship when measured using the new metrics.
• The metrics offer new ways to quantitatively characterize general intelligence in humans, animals, and machines.

In summary, the paper introduces valuable new tools to measure and understand general cognitive ability at the individual level across agents and tasks.

Explain in more detail the metrics the paper presents

The paper presents two new metrics, capability and generality, to characterize an agent's performance across a range of tasks: