ArticleRoyal Society open science2025
Text understanding in GPT-4 versus humans.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Text understanding in GPT-4 versus humans.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Open- and closed-source LLMs in medical and engineering education.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.