Ever since last week’s dramatic events at OpenAI, the rumor mill has been in overdrive about why the company’s chief scientific officer, Ilya Sutskever, and its board decided to oust CEO Sam Altman.
Reuters and The Information both report that researchers had come up with a new way to make powerful AI systems and had created a new model, called Q* (pronounced Q star), that was able to perform grade-school-level math.
According to the people who spoke to Reuters, some at OpenAI believe this could be a milestone in the company’s quest to build artificial general intelligence, a much-hyped concept referring to an AI system that is smarter than humans.
A machine that is able to reason about mathematics, could, in theory, be able to learn to do other tasks that build on existing information, such as writing computer code or drawing conclusions from a news article.
OpenAI has, for example, developed dedicated tools that can solve challenging problems posed in competitions for top math students in high school, but these systems outperform humans only occasionally.
Just last year, tech folks were saying the same things about Google DeepMind’s Gato, a “generalist” AI model that can play Atari video games, caption images, chat, and stack blocks with a real robot arm.
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