The Sparks of AGI? Or the End of Science?
We recorded 7 claims from this post. 3 were checked against evidence. 4 can’t be checked. 4 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (7)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“That claim would never survive serious scientific peer review.”
What we tested: Microsoft's claim that GPT-4 is an early (yet still incomplete) version of an AGI system would never survive serious scientific peer review.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“The problem of hallucinations is not solved; reliability is not solved; planning on complex tasks is (as the authors themselves acknowledge) not solved.”
What we tested: GPT-4 has not solved hallucinations, reliability, or planning on complex tasks.
What happened: OpenAI acknowledged that hallucinations remained at launch. Persisting fabricated answers support the related claim that factual reliability was not solved. (OpenAI, )
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“As I have said before, I don’t really think GPT-4 has much to do with AGI.”
What we tested: Marcus does not really think GPT-4 has much to do with AGI, as he has said before.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“The paper’s core claim— “GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence [as] demonstrated by its core mental capabilities (such as reasoning, creativity, and deduction)”—literally cannot be tested with serious scrutiny, because the scientific community has no access to the training data.”
What we tested: The Sparks of AGI paper's claim that GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence cannot be seriously tested because scientists have no access to its training data.
Assessment: MixedSaid
“Microsoft and OpenAI are producing and deploying products with potentially enormous risks at mass scale, and making extravagant, unreviewed and unreviewable claims about them, without sketching serious solutions to any of the potential problems they themselves have identified.”
What we tested: Microsoft and OpenAI are producing and deploying products with potentially enormous risks at mass scale, making extravagant, unreviewed and unreviewable claims about them, without sketching serious solutions to any of the potential problems they themselves have identified.
What held: Microsoft reported millions of active preview users and more than 45 million cumulative chats. This supports substantial public deployment; the separate total for all Bing users is not treated as AI-chat usage. (Microsoft Bing, )
What did not: The report describes reinforcement learning, safety-specific training, expert testing, and abuse monitoring as responses to acknowledged problems. Their publication contradicts the absence of substantive proposals, while the report also acknowledges remaining failures. (OpenAI, )
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“This cannot and should not stand.”
What we tested: Microsoft and OpenAI's opaque deployment of risky AI systems should not be allowed to continue.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“We must demand transparency, and if we don’t get it, we must contemplate shutting these projects down.”
What we tested: The public must demand transparency from Microsoft and OpenAI, and if it is not provided, consider shutting their projects down.
Held from this post (4)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: The two giant OpenAI and Microsoft papers have been about a model about which absolutely nothing has been revealed, neither the architecture nor the training set.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The record does not meet the current rules. Our reading, not assessed: Microsoft and OpenAI are rolling out extraordinarily powerful yet unreliable systems with multiple disclosed risks and no clear measure either of their safety or of how to constrain them.
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: OpenAI's incorporation of user experiments into its training corpus destroys the scientific community's ability to test whether its models generalize to new cases.