The “multiple PhDs” thing is interesting. The point of a PhD is to master both a very specific subject and the research skills needed to advance the frontier of knowledge in that area. There’s also plenty of secondary issues, like figuring out the politics of academia and publishing enough to establish a reputation.

I don’t think models are doing that. They certainly can retrieve a huge amount of information that would otherwise only be available to specialists such as people with PhDs… but I’m not convinced the models have the same level of understanding as a human PhD.

It’s easy to test though- the models simply have to write and defend a dissertation!

To my knowledge, this has not yet been done.