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Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence
Highlights from 95 Pages
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 entertaining and remarkable anecdotes.
The authors motivate the paper’s unusual format as follows:
One of the key aspects of GPT-4’s intelligence is its generality, the ability to seemingly understand and connect any topic, and to perform tasks that go beyond the typical scope of narrow AI systems […] We propose here a different approach to studying GPT-4 which is closer to traditional psychology rather than machine learning, leveraging human creativity and curiosity. We aim to generate novel and difficult tasks and questions that convincingly demonstrate that GPT-4 goes far beyond memorization, and that it has a deep and flexible understanding of concepts, skills, and domains.
SPARKS OF AGI, PAGE 7
GPT-4 Successes: My 4 Favorite Anecdotes
The authors include a huge variety of anecdotes, some of which are focused on specific subject areas such…
