Microsoft researchers have conducted an investigation on an early version of OpenAI’s GPT-4, and they have found that it exhibits more general intelligence than previous AI models. The model can solve novel and difficult tasks spanning mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology, and more, without needing any special prompting. Furthermore, in all of these tasks, GPT-4‘s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance and often vastly surpasses prior models. The researchers believe that GPT-4 could be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. This is in line with my own experience and shows that we are closer to AGI than we thought.
The study emphasizes the need to discover the limitations of such models and the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. The study concludes with reflections on the societal implications of the recent technological leap and future research directions.
One of the author explained the results in a great talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c