As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “smarter” was left to the respondents, and “answers as if it knows many things that I don’t know” is certainly a reasonable definition – even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn’t know anything.

As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty “smart”:

what’s a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn’t want to use “subjects” because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.

“Respondents” is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.

The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.

The data at downforeveryoneorjustme make it appear that “only lasted for about half an hour” is BS. In fact, they appear to be having problems again this morning.