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OpenAI co-founder and incumbent CEO Sam Altman has predicted the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner, with a breakthrough to come next year.
He was speaking during a feature interview with Garry Tan for Y Combinator, in which Altman set out a path that was “basically clear”, despite conflicting reports of stalled progress in model development across the industry.
The OpenAI chief was clear in his vision that the upcoming onset of AGI will be achieved through diligent engineering, with no further requirements for scientific progress.
“I think we are going to get there faster than people expect,” said the 39-year-old in a statement of his company’s confidence and assertion, which echoed his previous remarks.
“We actually know what to do… it’ll take a while, it’ll be hard, but that’s tremendously exciting,” he added, just days after OpenAI introduced a new search feature in its ChatGPT chatbot
Altman’s outlook “matches the view” of OpenAI researchers
A new report from The Information has provided insight into the rumored ‘Orion’ model from OpenAI which is said to have displayed less improvement over GPT-4 compared to the trends of previous generations of the model.
There was a marked lack of progress in coding, according to the report.
Altman’s company has established a new ‘Foundations Team’ to face up to the key challenges, including the lack of high-level training data, while the CEO’s overall outlook on AGI delivery is shared by prominent researchers Noam Brown and Clive Chan.
“I’ve heard people claim that Sam is just drumming up hype, but from what I’ve seen everything he’s saying matches the ~median view of OpenAI researchers on the ground,” said Brown.
The company’s approach has not quite been a case of chasing the impossible but at the beginning, it was aiming for something that was not on the vista. A breakthrough is now within reach due to the laborious research undertaken and a desire to achieve AGI.
Image credit: Via Midjourney
