DiscoverTech Stories Tech Brief By HackerNoonGPT-4 Outsmarts Humans in Theory of Mind Tests
GPT-4 Outsmarts Humans in Theory of Mind Tests

GPT-4 Outsmarts Humans in Theory of Mind Tests

Update: 2025-09-24
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This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/gpt-4-outsmarts-humans-in-theory-of-mind-tests.

GPT-4 outperformed humans in higher-order Theory of Mind tests, raising both possibilities and risks for the future of AI.

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This study compares the Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities of large language models like GPT-4, Flan-PaLM, PaLM, GPT-3.5, and LaMDA against humans. Results show that GPT-4 not only matched but exceeded human performance on complex ToM tasks, aided by its scale, multimodality, and fine-tuning. While larger models and instruction tuning improve social reasoning, findings also highlight ethical risks: AI systems with advanced ToM may better adapt to human goals but could equally enable manipulation and exploitation.

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GPT-4 Outsmarts Humans in Theory of Mind Tests

GPT-4 Outsmarts Humans in Theory of Mind Tests

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