AI vs Turing

“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” — A. M. Turing, 1950

The machine was picked as the human.

Turing set a test and a deadline. A judge talks to two strangers for five minutes, one person and one machine, and has to say which is which. Here is the bar he set, and what happened when it was finally run properly.

Turing's bar, 1950 ≤70%

He predicted that by about 2000 an average judge would identify the machine correctly no more than 70% of the time after five minutes.

GPT-4.5, 2025 27%

In a controlled three-party test, judges chose GPT-4.5 as the human 73% of the time, so they were right only 27% of the time. They picked the machine over the real person.

The 1966 chatbot ELIZA 23%

Judged human in 23% of games in the same study. The gap between ELIZA and GPT-4.5 is six decades of work.

Try it yourself

Play the imitation game

One witness is a person, one is a machine told to pass as human. Pick the machine.

Round 1 of 3 Score 0 / 0

Example answers written for this page to show the format. They are not taken from the study.

Logbook

How we got here

  1. 1950

    Turing poses the question

    “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in the journal Mind replaces “can machines think?” with a game anyone can run.

  2. 1966

    ELIZA

    Joseph Weizenbaum's script mirrors your words back as questions. Some users confided in it anyway.

  3. 1997

    Deep Blue beats Kasparov

    IBM's machine wins a six-game chess match against the reigning world champion.

  4. 2016

    AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol

    DeepMind wins 4–1 at Go, a game long thought to need human intuition.

  5. 2024

    A Nobel Prize for AlphaFold

    Demis Hassabis and John Jumper share the Chemistry prize for predicting protein structures. The AlphaFold database now holds about 200 million of them.

  6. 2025

    The Turing test, passed

    Jones and Bergen run a pre-registered three-party test. GPT-4.5 is judged human 73% of the time.

  7. 2025

    Gold at the Maths Olympiad

    Google DeepMind and OpenAI models each solve 5 of 6 IMO problems in plain language, reaching the gold-medal score of 35 out of 42.

Showcase

What it can do now

Passing for human was the old finish line. These are the things machines do today that Turing's test never asked about.

Conversation

Pass for a person

Hold a five-minute chat that most judges can't tell from a human's, in a controlled, repeatable study.

Judged human 73% of the time
Reasoning

Prove olympiad theorems

Write full proofs for the hardest school-level maths competition in the world, within the human time limit.

35 / 42 points, IMO 2025
Science

Read the shape of life

Predict the 3D structure of a protein from its sequence, work that once took a lab months or years per protein.

~200 million structures published
Strategy

Out-play the champions

Beat the best human players at chess and Go, and find moves professionals now study.

AlphaGo 4 – Lee Sedol 1
Sources
  1. Jones & Bergen, “Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test”, arXiv:2503.23674, March 2025
  2. EMBL-EBI, AlphaFold and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
  3. NYU Shanghai RITS, AI wins gold at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad
  4. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Mind 59 (1950), 433–460