Devanjana Mukherjee, Khabri Media
As the dust settles on the chaos at OpenAI, we still don’t know why CEO Sam Altman was fired — but reports have suggested it could be linked to a mysterious AI model.
Pic: Social Media
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It all began with the board consisting of Adam D’Angelo, Tosha McCauley, Ilya Sutskever, and Helen Toner, sacking Sam Altman. A lot of back and forth followed that, with Microsoft offering Altman a job heading a new advanced AI research team.
Meanwhile, nearly 700 employees of the 770 staff from OpenAI wrote an open letter pledging allegiance to Altman and threatened to quit and join Microsoft if the board was not dissolved and Altman was not reinstated.
The Information reported that a team led by OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever had made a breakthrough earlier this year, which allowed them to build a new model known as Q* (pronounced “Q star.”) The outlet reported that the model could solve basic math problems.
Sources told Reuters that this model provoked an internal firestorm, with several staff members writing a letter to OpenAI’s board warning that the new breakthrough could threaten humanity. Citing the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board leading to Altman’s firing, among which were concerns over commercializing advances before understanding the consequences.
Some at OpenAI believe Q* (pronounced Q-Star) could be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for what’s known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity as it was not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success.
Pic: Social Media
Currently, generative AI is good at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word, and answers to the same question can vary widely. But conquering the ability to do math — where there is only one right answer — implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence.
Unlike a calculator that can solve a limited number of operations, AGI can generalize, learn and comprehend. Researchers flagged AI’s prowess and potential danger, thus fore sighting the danger posed by highly intelligent machines.
Researchers have also flagged work by an “AI scientist” team, a group formed by combining earlier “Code Gen” and “Math Gen” teams, who were exploring how to optimize existing AI models to improve their reasoning and eventually perform scientific work.
Altman led efforts to make ChatGPT one of the fastest growing software applications in history and drew investment – and computing resources – necessary from Microsoft to get closer to AGI. In addition to announcing a slew of new tools in a demonstration this month, Altman last week teased at a summit of world leaders in San Francisco that he believed major advances were in sight.
