Shortly before OpenAI’s co-founder was fired (for four days), several researchers at the startup sent a letter to the board of directors describing a discovery in the field of artificial intelligence that they considered a potential “risk for the future.” Of humanity.”
As reported by Reuters on Thursday, citing two close sources, the letter raised concerns about the commercialization of technological advances before the consequences had been assessed.
Contacted by the news agency, OpenAI declined to comment on the case but confirms an internal message about a project called “Q*”, or “Q-Star”.
Some workers at the startup believe that Q* represents an innovation in the field of artificial general intelligence, which will include the ability to solve certain mathematical problems.
This is because researchers consider mathematics to be a frontier in the development of artificial intelligence.
Currently, this technology is functional in writing and language (such as the ChatGPT conversation bot or software capable of predicting the next word in written texts), where there is the possibility of obtaining different answers.
In the case of mathematics, there is only one correct answer, so if it can solve mathematical problems, artificial intelligence would be able to expand its capabilities to levels equivalent to those of human intelligence, the researchers consider.
Although he could only solve math problems at the level of elementary school students, the fact that he was successful on these tests made the researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success.
More than a simple calculator, capable of solving a limited set of mathematical operations, Artificial Intelligence may be able to generalize, learn and understand.
And thanks to vast computing resources, it will be possible for autonomous systems to eventually outperform humans in the most economically valuable tasks.
These warnings contributed to the firing of co-founder Sam Altman, who was eventually reinstated four days after more than 700 company employees threatened to resign.
To justify the dismissal, management simply said that Sam Altman “was not consistently honest in communications”, which affected his ability “to carry out his responsibilities”, meaning that it no longer had confidence “in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI.”
Last week, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, Sam Altman said that artificial intelligence will be greater than “any of the great technological revolutions” recorded so far, but also recognized the need to protect humanity from possible futures. threats.
Source: TSF
