As GPT-4 chatter resumes, Yoshua Bengio says ChatGPT is a 'wake-up call'

Yesterday, Microsoft Germany CTO Andreas Braun was quoted as saying that GPT-4 will be introduced next week and will include multimodal models. The report, which ran in the German news outlet Heise, instantly led to renewed online chatter about the possibility of GPT-4's debut, less than four months after the GPT 3.5 series, which ChatGPT is fine-tuned on, was released. Coincidentally, deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who won the 2018 Turing Award together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, also made comments yesterday about ChatGPT and the potential of multimodal models. In a virtual Q&A titled "What's Lacking In ChatGPT? Bridging the gap to human-level intelligence," Bengio said that current work on multimodal large neural nets, that have images or video as well as text, would "help a lot" with the'world model' issue -- that is, that models need to understand the physics of our world. He also warned that market pressures will likely push tech companies towards secrecy rather than openness with their AI models, and that the "media circus" around ChatGPT is a "wake-up call" about the potential of powerful AI systems to both do good for society as well as create significant ethical concerns.