OpenAI staff penned letter before Altman firing, warning of AI dangers
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Some staff at OpenAI believe Q* represents a breakthrough in the company's search for artificial general intelligence (AGI).
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman participates in a discussion during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit, November 16, 2023, in San Francisco, California. (AP)
A letter was penned by staff researchers at OpenAI and sent to the board of directors before CEO Sam Altman's 4-day exile, warning of an artificial intelligence discovery that could threaten humanity, informed sources told Reuters.
Before Altman's return on Tuesday, over 700 employees threatened to quit and join Microsoft in solidarity with Altman. The letter was cited by the sources as a factor on the list of grievances by the board, leading to his firing.
Some staff at OpenAI believe Q* represents a breakthrough in the company's search for artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a staffer who spoke to Reuters. AGI is defined by OpenAI as autonomous systems that exceed humans in most economically valuable tasks.
AI's potential dangers
The new project was shown to have the ability to solve mathematical problems, according to an anonymous source, but noted that despite the math being on a level of grade-school students, being able to excel at the problems gave researchers hope regarding Q*’s future success.
Generative AI at the moment is excelling at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word. However, being able to solve math problems that only have one right answer indicates that AI could have larger reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence.
As opposed to a calculator that can solve limited amounts of operations, AGI can generalize, learn, and comprehend.
The letter sent to the board includes researchers speaking of AI's potential danger, especially in the presence of highly intelligent machines, which could at any given moment compute that destroying humans could be of interest and benefit.
Altman intended to transform ChatGPT into one of the fastest and upcoming software applications in history and it garnered investment and computing resources required from Microsoft to develop AGI.
Last week, Altman announced at a summit of world leaders in San Francisco that he believed grand advancements and developments were coming.
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'Pushing the veil of ignorance back'
At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in California, he said: "Four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple weeks, I've gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime".
Just one day later, Altman was fired by the OpenAI board.
In August, a report published in Analytics India Magazine warned that Artificial Intelligence company OpenAI may go bankrupt by the end of 2024 if it doesn't generate enough profit soon.
The report explained that while Altman's company spends almost $700,000 per day to run AI studio ChatGPT; Microsoft and several other investors are covering these costs at their own expense.
"Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI is possibly keeping the company afloat at the moment," the report indicated.
