AI has crashed the Mensa party and human dominance on high level logic is perhaps coming to an end? By early 2026 AI became the elephant to be addressed in the IQ conversation following IQ scores of 145 and 141 posted by GPT-5.4 Pro and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview respectively on the Mensa Norway test.
A benchmark which is usually reserved for the top 0.4% and 99.8% of human intelligence. Now even more mainstream systems are catching up fast with OpenAI’s o3 model recently scoring 136, placing it well above 98% of people.
Forget a gradual timeline with incremental gains, what the world is witnessing looks like a total algorithmic ascent considering it was just a year ago, when AI systems were struggling to break an IQ of 90. Today, they’re doing it without breaking a sweat and dwarfing most humans on the same scale. a jump so sharp that even industry leaders suggest AI is improving by roughly one standard deviation per year.
Smarter scores, fuzzier meaning
In this desperation of comparing humans to machines, a systemic glitch is being revealed in the way we’re evaluating what constitutes ‘smart’. IQ tests were designed for humans and never calibrated for machines and applying those standards to it says more about the test than the technology. As Sandra Wachter an oxford researcher puts it “It can be very tempting to use the same measures we use for humans to describe capabilities or progress, but this is like comparing apples with oranges,”
Moreover, AI systems are hardwired on vast datasets, optimized to understand identifying patterns and backed by enormous computational power. All of these factors make it easier to ace the “IQ” performance, which explains why they do so well. As scores rise, perception is starting to shift with 25% of Gen Z believing AI is conscious or is about to be. Yet there’s nothing to worry about; rest assured the reality is less sci-fi; skynet is not about to go online if listening to the experts.
Afterall, AI may simulate high IQ performance, still the general intelligence and self-awareness of humans is lost on the machine. In the end, misreading what their IQ scores actually mean is more of a looming danger than machines akin to humans.
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