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Record W4407793840 · doi:10.1098/rsos.241313

Text understanding in GPT-4 versus humans

2025· article· en· W4407793840 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueRoyal Society Open Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicText Readability and Simplification
Canadian institutionsMila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence InstituteMcGill University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsBiologyComputer scienceComputational biology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

We examine whether a leading AI system, GPT-4, understands text as well as humans do, first using a well-established standardized test of discourse comprehension. On this test, GPT-4 performs slightly, but not statistically significantly, better than humans given the very high level of human performance. Both GPT-4 and humans make correct inferences about information that is not explicitly stated in the text, a critical test of understanding. Next, we use more difficult passages to determine whether that could allow larger differences between GPT-4 and humans. GPT-4 does considerably better on this more difficult text than do the high school and university students for whom these the text passages are designed, as admission tests of student reading comprehension. Deeper exploration of GPT-4's performance on material from one of these admission tests reveals generally accepted signatures of genuine understanding, namely generalization and inference.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScholarly communication
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.938
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0040.002
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.069
GPT teacher head0.341
Teacher spread0.272 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it