Was Sam Altman's Sacking By OpenAI's Board Over 'Q-Star' Breakthrough Seen As Threat To Humanity? 
A day before Sam was fired, he gave this chilling speech...
SNIP:
An internal conflict at OpenAI has surfaced and is rooted in an ideological battle between those pushing for rapid AI advancement and those advocating for a slower, more responsible approach to development.
Reuters spoke with an OpenAI spokesperson who confirmed the existence of the project Q* and the letter to the board before Altman's firing.
So why is Q* a breakthrough?
Well, as tech blog 9to5Mac explains:
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 technological development could be some of the first signs AGI, a form of AI that can surpass humans, is imminent for commercialization.
AGI has the potential to surpass humans in every field, including creativity, problem-solving, decision-making, language understanding, etc., raising concerns about massive job displacement. A recent Goldman report outlines how 300 million layoffs could be coming to the Western world because of AI.
The Q* breakthrough and the rapid advancement of this technology now make sense why the board abruptly fired Altman for his rush to develop this technology without studying the model's impact on how it threatens humanity.
Altman recently said, "I think this is like, definitely the biggest update for people yet. And maybe the biggest one we’ll have because from here on, like, now people accept that powerful AI is, is gonna happen, and there will be incremental updates… there was like the year the first iPhone came out, and then there was like every one since." |