✨Microsoft Research Claims GPT-4 Step Towards AGI

Is the race to AGI PR clickbait or fundamentally true or real?

Hey Everyone,

Microsoft is claiming GPT-4 is a paradigm shifting technologies exhibiting elements of Artificial General Intelligence. It’s really as fascinating 154-page report entitled Sparks of Artificial Intelligence: Early Experiments With GPT-4. The definition the researchers use for AGI is old and it’s not clear what they mean by “sparks” and they do cite a lot of limitations.

The eyebrow-raising claim from Microsoft appears to be a publicity stunt even as OpenAI has always claimed it was in the pursuit of AGI.

Sam Altman recently sat down with a podcast with Lex Fridman that you can watch here:

Microsoft Research insist that Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4, was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data.

✨ “Sparks” of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models.

Photo Credit: Semafor - Al Luca.

Around 2018, Elon Musk tried to take over OpenAI (Semafor) and failed. The nonprofit had launched in 2015 to great fanfare with backing from billionaire tech luminaries like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who had as a group pledged $1 billion. It appears that Elon Musk’s failure to takeover OpenAI resulted in the private and corporate backers OpenAI has today.

However this claim that GPT-4 is nearly at AGI deserves our scrutiny.

Let’s go into some more depth about depth about what they actually are claiming.

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