Rethinking AI Intelligence: From Benchmarks to Real Understanding

Quanta’s interview with Melanie Mitchell argues AI cognition isn’t human-like thinking but alien intelligence that requires new testing methods borrowed from developmental and comparative psychology; she outlines six principles to assess machine cognition, warns against overreliance on benchmarks and anthropomorphism, discusses transfer and 'task tyranny', uses Clever Hans as a cautionary tale, and champions mechanistic interpretability to reveal how AIs work and where they fail, shaping safe deployment and the future of science.