Opinion Editorial August, 2025: Humanity's Last Exam
Humanity's Last Exam is a new benchmark test that scores the artificial intelligence systems that have started taking over our lives. It is by far the most challenging test for such systems. Any human achieving the current best score would be deemed to have failed the exam.
It requires highly specialized knowledge in so many fields that no human will ever pass it. Its name is misleading because it is not intended to be an exam for humans to take.
Last month, Grok 4 went to the top of the leaderboard with a score of only 25% accuracy. Yet the year 2027 is the current industry consensus on when such AI systems will achieve so-called superintelligence.
How do we resolve such an obvious paradox?
The main reason for such poor performance differs between us and AI. AI doesn't yet have the "intelligence" to understand the questions well enough. Humans simply don't live long enough to acquire the requisite knowledge.
One human who has lived longer than most is His Holiness the Dalai Lama. On his ninetieth birthday last month, he ended years of speculation by announcing that he will be reincarnated as the fifteenth Dalai Lama. While the concept of reincarnation has always been central to Tibetan Buddhism, it is not supported by any scientific evidence. Also, the idea that someone can control whether they will be reincarnated is eccentric by any measure.
The Chinese Communist Party has long maintained that the Dalai Lama's reincarnation is irrelevant. The CPP is steadfast that it will choose the fifteenth version. That seems eccentric too given that Chairman Mao once told the Dalai Lama that religion is poison. Even more eccentric is the growing trend in China of young people visiting fortune tellers to ask whether AI will steal their job.
We can be certain that when the time comes, there will be global interest in the question of who is the real Dalai Lama. Some will then rely on AI to answer that question. Yet if any AI system (present or future) were to posit the concept of reincarnation, or assert its veracity, most people would say it was hallucinating. If I claimed that the man in this month's photo will be the next Dalai Lama, you should correctly conclude that I am hallucinating.
Doctor Doolittle is a fictitious character who has entertained children for over a hundred years. His popularity stems from it being fantasy to communicate with animals. Yet beginning next month, the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience will begin using AI to go beyond animal communication. It will seek to understand their emotions and formulate animal welfare policy. While these are noble goals, if AI has truly become this powerful, there are surely more pressing problems for it to solve.
AI-based photo enhancement software has been around for many years. But Vogue magazine last month carried advertising that used an AI-generated fashion model for the first time in its long history.
While it should not surprise us that AI can now take jobs away from the fashion industry, there is a broader discussion to be had around this development. One of the most striking findings in cultural anthropology is the diversity in how societies assess human beauty. AI now has the potential to homogenize that diversity in the name of cost cutting.
Last month after fifty years, South Park S27 E1 took over from Fawlty Towers S1 E6 as the greatest comedy episode ever. But when Cartman declared that woke is dead, Stone and Parker missed their chance to extend his sentiment to upcoming regulation against "woke AI."
It is well documented that many students now routinely use AI to assist them with their coursework. If there is ever to be a last exam for humans to take, perhaps it will need only one question: Should we continue to blindly accept AI influencing our minds and our societies? Clearly, we are already failing humanity's last real exam.
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