Microsoft’s partnership with ChatGPT developer OpenAI has resulted in the creation of the Bing AI service. Following the collaboration, Microsoft researchers released a paper claiming the technology is showing signs of general intelligence.
Investigating OpenAI’s new GPT-4 neural net, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 explores the potential of the new AI tech. As it turns out, the upgraded ChatGPT is the first step towards artificial general intelligence.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the point where an AI’s capabilities are on par with or above that of a human brain. While services like ChatGPT may look intelligent to some, they are far less capable than humans.
In the paper, Microsoft researchers state that the capabilities of the advanced AI program are approaching human levels. The paper reads:
“We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”
However, the researchers also point out that OpenAI’s GPT-4 software has severe limitations that humans don’t. The paper claims that the new software challenges “many widely held assumptions about the nature of machine intelligence”, but is still restrictive.
“We recognize the current limitations of GPT-4 and that there is still work to be done. We will continue to engage the broader scientific community in exploring future research directions, including those required to address the societal and ethical implications of these increasingly intelligent systems.”
As with the current generation of ChatGPT, the new generation of AI technology is impressive upon first use. However, the it’s used, the more its limitations become clear.