There have been reports that researchers at OpenAI had
made a “breakthrough” in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some media
agencies report that such researchers had come up with a new way
to make powerful AI systems and had created a new model, called
Q. Star, that was able to perform grade-school-level math.
Researchers have for years tried to get AI models to solve
math problems. Language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 can
do some math, but not very well or reliably.
People who worry about whether AI poses an existential
risk to humans, one of OpenAI’s founding concerns, fear that
such capabilities might lead to rogue AI. Safety concerns might
arise if such AI systems are allowed to set their own goals and
start to interface with a real physical or digital world in some
ways, says Katie Collins, a PhD researcher at the University of
Cambridge.
However, while math capability might take us a step
closer to more powerful AI systems, solving these sorts of math
problems doesn’t signal the birth of a superintelligence.
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