Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

Highlights from 95 Pages

This image was generated by the author using DALL-E with the prompt, “sparks of artificial general intelligence, digital art” and “sparks of artificial general intelligence gpt-4, digital art.”

I recently finished reading the intriguing paper Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 published by researchers at Microsoft in spring 2023. In this post, I provide a condensed overview of the paper’s content.

The central claim of the paper is that the large language model GPT-4 demonstrates signs of artificial general intelligence, the holy grail of AI. As Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and indeed, the evidence in the paper is extraordinary.

A Note on References

The “Sparks of AGI” paper is posted on arXiv under a CC BY 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International license. In this post, I focus on the main body of the paper (pages 1–95). There is an appendix that extends the total length of the PDF to 155 pages.

Overall Impressions

I highly recommend that anybody interested in AI read this paper. It is thought-provoking, amusing, disturbing, and intriguing. The paper has already been cited over 960 times.

It is an unconventionally structured paper — rather than following a typical Intro/Related Work/Methods/Results/Conclusion format, it is instead organized as a collection of…