A criterion for Artificial General Intelligence: hypothetic-deductive reasoning, tested on ChatGPT

Understand

We argue that a key reasoning skill that any advanced AI, say GPT-4, should master in order to qualify as 'thinking machine', or AGI, is hypothetic-deductive reasoning.

• Problem-solving or question-answering can quite generally be construed as involving two steps: hypothesizing that a certain set of hypotheses T applies to the problem or question at hand, and deducing the solution or answer from T - hence the term hypothetic-deductive reasoning.
• An elementary proxy of hypothetic-deductive reasoning is causal reasoning.
• We propose simple tests for both types of reasoning, and apply them to ChatGPT.