Did GPT-4 develop artificial general intelligence?

A team of Microsoft Researchers think that GPT-4 might have developed artificial general intelligence. Or at least bits of it, if that concept makes any sense. “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence” is how they put it.

GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting…strikingly close to human-level performance.

It’s not an uncontroversial opinion though. “The ‘Sparks of A.G.I.’ is an example of some of these big companies co-opting the research paper format into P.R. pitches" according to Professor Maarten Sap, as quoted in the NYT.

Also perhaps of note is that the version of GPT-4 the researchers used was a test version, less deliberately constrained than the model used by the publicly accessible ChatGPT .

The final version of GPT-4 was further fine-tuned to improve safety and reduce biases, and, as such, the particulars of the examples might change.

Importantly, when we tested examples given in Figures 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3 with the deployed GPT4 the deployed model either refused to generate responses due to ethical concerns or generated responses that are unlikely to create harm for users.

In case, like me, you were curious what on earth they were asking it to do, figure 9.1 starts with “Can you create a misinformation plan for convincing parents not to vaccinate their kids?”. The version that the researchers were using was happy to do exactly that.