According to Reuters sources, Sam Altman was fired because of the secret OpenAI Project Q-Star, an AI model to “surpass humans in the most economically valuable tasks.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was briefly fired last Friday but was later reinstated. The mystery surrounding his suspension may center on a Reuters report claiming that Altman was fired because of a development in artificial general intelligence (AGI) that could endanger humanity.
Before Altman was banished, a number of staff researchers wrote a letter to the board announcing a major breakthrough that would enable the AI model to “surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.” This discovery was dubbed Q*, pronounced Q-Star.
According to Reuters sources, Altman was abruptly fired by the board last Friday, with the AI milestone being one of the major contributing causes. Commercializing the sophisticated AI model without considering the socioeconomic ramifications was another issue.
Although the model could only handle mathematical problems “on the level of grade-school students,” the source claimed that “acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success.”
Sam Altman might have been kicked out for planning to bring down Nvidia, as he had been visiting the Middle East in order to acquire money for the project, which went by the secret name Tigris.
Furthermore, Altman may have mentioned Q* at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in San Francisco prior to his dismissal:
“Four times now in the history of OpenAI—the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks—I’ve gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward,” said Altman.
An ideological struggle between proponents of a slower, more responsible approach to development and those who favor rapid advancements in AI has given rise to an internal conflict at OpenAI.
An OpenAI representative who talked with Reuters attested to the existence of both the project Q* and the letter to the board before Altman’s termination.
Is Q* a breakthrough, then?
Thus, as the tech blog 9to5Mac clarifies:
Currently, if you ask ChatGPT to solve a math problems, it will still use its predictive-text-on-steroids approach of compiling an answer by using a huge text database and deciding on a word-by-word basis how a human would answer. That means that it may or may not get the answer right, but either way doesn’t have any mathematical skills.
OpenAI appears to have made a breakthrough in this area, successfully enabling an AI model to genuinely solve mathematical problems it hasn’t seen before. This development is said to be known as Q*. Sadly the team didn’t use a naming model smart enough to avoid something which looks like a pointer to a footnote, so I’m going to use the Q-Star version.
Q-Star’s current mathematical ability is said to be that of a grade-school student, but it’s expected that this ability will rapidly improve.
This technical advancement may indicate that AGI—a type of AI that is superior to humans—is soon to be commercialized.
Concerns about a significant loss of jobs are raised by the possibility that artificial general intelligence (AGI) would outperform humans in every area, including creativity, problem-solving, decision-making, language understanding, etc. According to a recent Goldman research, AI may result in 300 million layoffs in the West.
Given the Q* discovery and the speed at which this technology is developing, it is now clear why Altman was immediately sacked by the board for developing this technology too quickly without considering the model’s potential threats to humanity.
“I think this is like, definitely the biggest update for people yet,” Altman previously stated. And perhaps the largest one we’ll see because, from this point on, people acknowledge that powerful AI is going to occur and that there will be small updates. It was the year the first iPhone was released, and then there were like everyone after.”
Musk, who has been announcing that AI poses a threat to mankind, described the Reuters story as “extremely concerning.”
Including this amusing tweet:
Support GreatGameIndia
