Alan Turing, the trailblazing mathematician played by Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game (2014), is considered the “father of artificial intelligence.” One of his legacies is the Turing test, which measures whether a machine can think like a human, and has long been a North Star in the artificial intelligence field. For the Turing test, a person and a machine have a text conversation, and another human tries to determine which participant is the human. The test, created in 1950, was originally named the “imitation game” because it gauges how intelligent a machine is based on how indistinguishable it is from a human.
An A.I. program called Eugene Goostman first passed the Turing test in 2014, and newer chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA have passed it more recently. Considering the increasing sophistication of generative A.I. chatbots, the test is outmoded, and machine intelligence demands a new lodestar, according to Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of the A.I. lab DeepMind. Suleyman, who sold DeepMind to Google for $650 million in 2014, is among the few A.I. founders to have already made his millions in the field.
