So many people conveniently disregard facts like this. It's much easier to write it off as "impressive auto-complete", "a writing assistant", "simply regurgitating the training data", etc.
It's an alien intelligence that we barely understand. It has many limitations but also possesses insane capabilities that have not been fully explored.
What happens when you take gpt-5, give it 100x more context / "memory", the ability to think to itself in-between tokens, chain many of them together in such a way that they have more agent-like behavior, along with ten other enhancements we haven't thought of? No one knows...
The biggest limitation of GPT capabilities is our imagination.
Well, lawyers pass the bar exam and they're not human either (ba-dum dum!)
In all seriousness, I know of a few lawyers who would tell you that's not as impressive as non-lawyers think it is.
And the reality is, it did not technically "pass" the bar exam. That's media spin and hype. It doesn't have personhood, it's not a student, it's not being evaluated under the same strict set of conditions. It was an engineering exercise done specially crafted conditions and that makes all the difference in the world.
I'm a magician and this reminds me of ESP tests in the 70s where frauds like Uri Gellar fooled scientists (at NASA no less) into believing they had psychic powers. The scientists were fooled in large part because it's what they wanted to believe, and the conditions were favourable to the fraudster doing parlour tricks.
The most interesting part about the results are that it "passed" the essay portion, otherwise we would expect any computer software to be answer questions correctly that have a single correct answer. But who is evaluating those essays? Are they top lawyers who are giving the essays extremely close scrutiny or are they overworked university professors who have a hundred to read and grade and just want to go home to their families?
And what is the objective criteria for "passing" those essay questions? Often times the content, in a formal education setting, is not as relevant as the formatting and making sure that certain key points are touched upon. Does it need to be an essay that is full of factually-verifiable data points or is it an opinion piece? Is the point to show that you can argue a particular point of view? I mean when it comes to something open-ended, why wouldn't any LLM be able to "pass" it? It's the subjective evaluation of the person grading the essay that gets to decide on its grade. And at the end of the day it's just words that must conform to certain rules. Of course computers should be "good" at that sort of thing. The only thing that's been historically very challenging has been natural language processing. That's ChatGPT's contribution to advancing the field of ML.
So I'm not that that shaken by a chat-bot being able to bullshit it's way through the bar exam since bullshitting is the base job qualification for being a lawyer anyway :P (couldn't help bookending with another lawyer joke .. sorry).
To be fair, this 8th grader passed the bar exam..