Some Glimpse AGI in ChatGPT. Others Call It a Mirage

Sébastien Bubeck, a machine learning researcher at Microsoft, woke up one night last September thinking about artificial intelligence--and unicorns. Bubeck had recently gotten early access to GPT-4, a powerful text generation algorithm from OpenAI and an upgrade to the machine learning model at the heart of the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT. Bubeck was part of a team working to integrate the new AI system into Microsoft's Bing search engine. But he and his colleagues kept marveling at how different GPT-4 seemed from anything they'd seen before. GPT-4, like its predecessors, had been fed massive amounts of text and code and trained to use the statistical patterns in that corpus to predict the words that should be generated in reply to a piece of text input.