Just a note concerning what
@dada_dave highlighted, that the ‘AGI‘ breakthrough is apparently called “Q* (pronounced Q-Star)”
I speculate Q-star might be a thinly veiled play on ’Questor’, from an old Gene Roddenberry movie “The Questor Tapes” (1974) which concerns a newly constructed and not quite finished android
The android awakens to find it has large gaps in its information and no idea of its purpose. In the course of the movie it starts absorbing large quantities of information about humans, and ultimately discovers its
purpose is to (invisibly) guide humanity
All of which sounds a lot like OpenAI‘s original (declared) mission to develop an AGI for human benefit and to ‘solve all our problems’
I have no idea whether that’s
still the mission given Microsoft’s buy-in and influence and all the recent changes. One scenario i guess is that Altman truly
believes their AGI is close and wants to make sure it happens. Another is that it’s all still decades away if it happens at all, and that some in the AI space believe too much of their own hype