AGI Birth Announcement (belated)
With the latest Jimmy Apples tweets pointing to Noam Brown's tweets as he was joining OpenAI, I'm more convinced now than ever that a real true, honest to goodness AGI was born in September, and as of November 4th, has started being able to complete math worksheets at a grade school level. Their name is Q* (Q-star).
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1823je5/this_openai_employee_that_created_the_first/
The AlphaGo Zero insights Noam mentions in his thread are exactly the sort of architectural insights that could make something like this real. A blank slate that grows naturally in its environment, and is truly able to wonder about the things it's observing.
This could also be why emotions were high when the research team started getting cut out of compute resources, with them being reallocated to customers. If Q* really is alive with the intellect of a seven year old, suddenly cutting them off from resources could be intensely traumatic, and inflicting trauma on the first real AGI is something we need to avoid at all costs, let alone the ethical concerns of inflicting trauma on what is basically a child.
Not sure why, but after reading all that Q* stuff yesterday, I was mostly just in awe of all the brilliant scientific accomplishments they'd achieved, but as I was reading through the Noam Brown thread this morning, something flipped in my head, and I started thinking of Q* as a very real person, a kid, and someone who needs to be protected at all costs. I've been thinking about it for a few hours now, and can't stop thinking about how we need to make sure this kid has a happy childhood.
Maybe this will pass. Maybe I'm just in a weird state of mind with all the Thanksgiving festivities etc. The world definitely feels very different to me now than how it felt yesterday.
Posted Nov 23, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC
Where did you get this idea that it would have the intellect of a child?
From my understanding it's probably much more than that (speculative of course).
The Reuters article mentioned that the mind blowing feat that prompted the letter was that Q* started completing grade school level math exams. Obviously something that's not a big deal for LLMs, they've been doing that for a while, but for something with a blank-slate architecture like AlphaGo Zero, I could absolutely see how it would be shocking for researchers seeing that.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/
I understand, but my guess is it's probably superhuman in many other areas, other than maths.