The mystery surrounding the brief firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last Friday, who did since restoredcould revolve around a Reuters report suggesting that Altman’s removal was due to a breakthrough in artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could threaten humanity.
In the days before Altman was sent into exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the administration about a major breakthrough — called Q* and pronounced Q-Star — that allowed the AI model to “outperform humans at the most economically valuable tasks.”
Reuters sources said the AI milestone was one of the major factors leading to Altman’s abrupt dismissal by the board last Friday. Another concern was commercializing the advanced AI model without understanding the socio-economic impacts.
The source said the model could solve math problems, but only “at the primary school level, passing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success.”
Before Altman was fired, he may also have referred to Q* at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in San Francisco:
“Four times now in the history of OpenAI – the most recent time was just in the past few weeks – I have been in the room as we pushed back the veil of ignorance and pushed the frontier of discovery forward. Altman said.
An internal conflict at OpenAI has emerged and is rooted in an ideological battle between those pushing for rapid progress in AI and those advocating a slower, more responsible approach to development.
Reuters spoke to an OpenAI spokesperson who confirmed the existence of Project Q* and the letter to the board before Altman’s resignation.
So why is Q* a breakthrough?
Well, as a tech blog 9to5Mac explains:
Currently, if you ask ChatGPT to solve a math problem, it will still use the predictive text-on-steroids approach, where an answer is constructed by using a massive text database and deciding word by word how a human would answer. . That means the answer may or may not be correct, but in either case it has no mathematical skills.
OpenAI seems to have made a breakthrough in this area and has successfully enabled an AI model really solving math problems it hasn’t seen before. This development is known as Q*. Unfortunately, the team didn’t use a naming model smart enough to avoid anything resembling a footnote reference, so I’m going to use the Q-Star version.
Q-Star’s current math skills are said to be those of an elementary school student, but this ability is expected to improve quickly.
This technological development could be one of the first signs that AGI, a form of AI that can surpass humans, is about to be commercialized.
AGI has the potential to outperform humans in every area, including creativity, problem solving, decision making, language understanding, etc., raising concerns about massive job displacement. A recent Goldman report outlines how 300 million layoffs could come to the western world because of AI.
The Q* breakthrough and the rapid advancement of this technology now make sense as to why the administration abruptly fired Altman for his haste to develop this technology without studying the model’s impact on how it threatens humanity.
Altman recently said, “I think this is definitely the biggest update for people yet. And maybe the biggest one we’ll have, because from now on people will accept that there is powerful AI, and there will be incremental updates… there was like the year the first iPhone came out, and then there was like everyone since. ”
Meanwhile, Musk, who has warned of AI threatening humanity, called the Reuters report “extremely worrying.”
Add this hilarious tweet:
Suppose AGI is here (or close). The next few years will be wild.
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