Is AI Smarter Than Humans? It Depends What You Mean by Smart

"Smart" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this question

If "smart" means scoring well on standardized tests, then yes. GPT-4 passes the bar exam in the 90th percentile and scores in the top 10% on the SAT. By that measure, AI is smarter than most humans.

If "smart" means understanding what the bar exam questions actually mean in the real world of practicing law — no. Not even close.

Where AI outperforms humans

• Speed: AI processes information millions of times faster.
• Memory: AI can recall its entire training dataset instantly. You forget where you put your keys.
• Consistency: AI does not get tired, hungry, or emotional. It performs the same at 3am as at noon.
• Pattern matching: Given millions of examples, AI finds statistical patterns humans cannot see.

Where humans outperform AI

• Transfer learning: You can learn to ride a bicycle and then immediately understand how a motorcycle works. AI trained on bicycles knows nothing about motorcycles.
• Context awareness: You know not to compliment someone's haircut at a funeral. AI does not understand social context.
• Reasoning with limited information: You can make reasonable decisions with almost no data. AI needs thousands of examples.
• Motivation: You have goals and desires that drive your behavior. AI has a loss function. These are not the same thing.

The honest assessment

AI is a tool that is exceptionally good at specific, narrow tasks. Calling it "smarter" than humans is like saying a calculator is smarter than a mathematician. The calculator is faster at arithmetic. The mathematician understands what the numbers mean.

The real question is not "Is AI smarter?" but "How can I use AI to be more effective?" — which is exactly the thinking behind tools like Humanize AI Pro.