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OpenAI is a leader in the race to develop AI as intelligent as a human. Yet, employees continue to show up in the press and on podcasts to voice their grave concerns about safety at the $80 billion nonprofit research lab. The latest comes from The Washington Post, where an anonymous source claimed OpenAI rushed through safety tests and celebrated its product before ensuring its safety.

They planned the launch after-party prior to knowing if it was safe to launch, an anonymous employee told The Washington Post. We basically failed at the process.

Safety issues loom large at OpenAI and seem to just keep coming. Current and former employees at OpenAI recently signed an open letter demanding better safety and transparency practices from the startup, not long after its safety team was dissolved following the departure of cofounder Ilya Sutskever. Jan Leike, a key OpenAI researcher,resigned shortly after,claiming in a post that safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products at the company.

Safety is core to OpenAIs charter, with a clause that claims OpenAI will assist other organizations to advance safety if artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is reached at a competitor instead of continuing to compete. It claims to be dedicated to solving the safety problems inherent to such a large, complex system. OpenAI even keeps its proprietary models private, rather than open (causing jabs and lawsuits), for the sake of safety. The warnings make it sound as though safety has been deprioritized despite being so paramount to the culture and structure of the company.

Its clear that OpenAI is in the hot seat but public relations efforts alone wont suffice to safeguard society

Were proud of our track record providing the most capable and safest AI systems and believe in our scientific approach to addressing risk, OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson said in a statement to The Verge. Rigorous debate is critical given the significance of this technology, and we will continue to engage with governments, civil society and other communities around the world in service of our mission.

The stakes around safety, according to OpenAI and others studying the emergent technology, are immense. Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security, a report commissioned by the US State Department in March said. The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.

The alarm bells at OpenAI also follow the boardroom coup last year that briefly ousted CEO Sam Altman. The board said he was removed due to a failure to be consistently candid in his communications, leading to an investigation that did little to reassure the staff.

OpenAI spokesperson Lindsey Held told the Post the GPT-4o launch didnt cut corners on safety, but another unnamed company representative acknowledged that the safety review timeline was compressed to a single week. We are rethinking our whole way of doing it, the anonymous representative told the Post. This [was] just not the best way to do it.

Do you know more about whats going on inside OpenAI? Id love to chat. You can reach me securely on Signal, where Im @kylie.01, or via email at kylie@theverge.com.

In the face of rolling controversies (remember the Her incident?), OpenAI has attempted to quell fears with a few well-timed announcements. This week, itannounced it is teaming up with Los Alamos National Laboratory to explore how advanced AI models, such as GPT-4o, can safely aid in bioscientific research, and in the same announcement, it repeatedly pointed to Los Alamos own safety record. The next day, an anonymous spokesperson told Bloomberg that OpenAI created an internal scale to track the progress its large language models are making toward artificial general intelligence.

This weeks safety-focused announcements from OpenAI appear to be defensive window dressing in the face of growing criticism of its safety practices. Its clear that OpenAI is in the hot seat but public relations efforts alone wont suffice to safeguard society. What truly matters is the potential impact on those beyond the Silicon Valley bubble if OpenAI continues to fail to develop AI with strict safety protocols, as those internally claim: the average person doesnt have a say in the development of privatized AGI, and yet they have no choice in how protected theyll be from OpenAIs creations.

AI tools can be revolutionary, FTC Chair Lina Khan told Bloomberg in November. But as of right now, she said, there are concerns that the critical inputs of these tools are controlled by a relatively small number of companies.

If the numerous claims against the companys safety protocols are accurate, this surely raises serious questions about OpenAIs fitness for this role as steward of AGI, a role that the organization has essentially assigned to itself. Allowing one group in San Francisco to control potentially society-altering technology is cause for concern, and theres an urgent demand even within its own ranks for transparency and safety now more than ever.

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OpenAI is plagued by safety concerns - The Verge

OpenAI recently unveiled a five-tier system to gauge its advancement toward developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to an OpenAI spokesperson who spoke with Bloomberg. The company shared this new classification system on Tuesday with employees during an all-hands meeting, aiming to provide a clear framework for understanding AI advancement. However, the system describes hypothetical technology that does not yet exist and is possibly best interpreted as a marketing move to garner investment dollars.

OpenAI has previously stated that AGIa nebulous term for a hypothetical concept that means an AI system that can perform novel tasks like a human without specialized trainingis currently the primary goal of the company. The pursuit of technology that can replace humans at most intellectual work drives most of the enduring hype over the firm, even though such a technology would likely be wildly disruptive to society.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously stated his belief that AGI could be achieved within this decade, and a large part of the CEO's public messaging has been related to how the company (and society in general) might handle the disruption that AGI may bring. Along those lines, a ranking system to communicate AI milestones achieved internally on the path to AGI makes sense.

OpenAI's five levelswhich it plans to share with investorsrange from current AI capabilities to systems that could potentially manage entire organizations. The company believes its technology (such as GPT-4o that powers ChatGPT) currently sits at Level 1, which encompasses AI that can engage in conversational interactions. However, OpenAI executives reportedly told staff they're on the verge of reaching Level 2, dubbed "Reasoners."

Bloomberg lists OpenAI's five "Stages of Artificial Intelligence" as follows:

A Level 2 AI system would reportedly be capable of basic problem-solving on par with a human who holds a doctorate degree but lacks access to external tools. During the all-hands meeting, OpenAI leadership reportedly demonstrated a research project using their GPT-4 model that the researchers believe shows signs of approaching this human-like reasoning ability, according to someone familiar with the discussion who spoke with Bloomberg.

The upper levels of OpenAI's classification describe increasingly potent hypothetical AI capabilities. Level 3 "Agents" could work autonomously on tasks for days. Level 4 systems would generate novel innovations. The pinnacle, Level 5, envisions AI managing entire organizations.

This classification system is still a work in progress. OpenAI plans to gather feedback from employees, investors, and board members, potentially refining the levels over time.

Ars Technica asked OpenAI about the ranking system and the accuracy of the Bloomberg report, and a company spokesperson said they had "nothing to add."

OpenAI isn't alone in attempting to quantify levels of AI capabilities. As Bloomberg notes, OpenAI's system feels similar to levels of autonomous driving mapped out by automakers. And in November 2023, researchers at Google DeepMind proposed their own five-level framework for assessing AI advancement, showing that other AI labs have also been trying to figure out how to rank things that don't yet exist.

OpenAI's classification system also somewhat resembles Anthropic's "AI Safety Levels" (ASLs) first published by the maker of the Claude AI assistant in September 2023. Both systems aim to categorize AI capabilities, though they focus on different aspects. Anthropic's ASLs are more explicitly focused on safety and catastrophic risks (such as ASL-2, which refers to "systems that show early signs of dangerous capabilities"), while OpenAI's levels track general capabilities.

However, any AI classification system raises questions about whether it's possible to meaningfully quantify AI progress and what constitutes an advancement (or even what constitutes a "dangerous" AI system, as in the case of Anthropic). The tech industry so far has a history of overpromising AI capabilities, and linear progression models like OpenAI's potentially risk fueling unrealistic expectations.

There is currently no consensus in the AI research community on how to measure progress toward AGI or even if AGI is a well-defined or achievable goal. As such, OpenAI's five-tier system should likely be viewed as a communications tool to entice investors that shows the company's aspirational goals rather than a scientific or even technical measurement of progress.

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OpenAI reportedly nears breakthrough with reasoning AI, reveals progress framework - Ars Technica

An OpenAI spokesperson has shared the companys new 5-tier system for ranking its progress toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), reports Bloomberg.

The levels, which were announced by the company behind ChatGPT internally at an all-hands meeting before being shared externally, are designed to guide thinking about artificial intelligence (AI) and its capabilities as the company works to develop models with real reasoning capabilities.

The levels in the system were outlined like this:

AGI is the long-term goal for many companies involved in the AI arms race, including Mark Zuckerbergs Meta.

While OpenAI believes they are currently at level 1, their spokesperson said they are on the cusp of reaching the second level, Reasoners.

During the all-hands meeting where the new levels were announced, OpenAI also demonstrated some new research centered around its GPT4 model, which they believe shows skills approaching human-level reasoning.

The levels, which were designed by OpenAIs senior leadership team and executives, are not considered final. As the organization gathers feedback and additional input from its employees and investors, it may alter the levels and definitions over time to better fit the broader understanding of AI progress.

OpenAIs stated mission is to develop safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity, however, earlier this year the company effectively dissolved its safety-oriented Superalignment group after the departure of Chief Scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever. This has led to questions being raised about whether the company can truly live up to its mission statement.

Featured image credit: generated with Ideogram

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ChatGPT maker OpenAI now has a scale to rank its AI - ReadWrite

OpenAI has created an internal scale to track the progress its large language models are making toward artificial general intelligence, or AI with human-like intelligence, a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Todays chatbots, like ChatGPT, are at Level 1. OpenAI claims it is nearing Level 2, defined as a system that can solve basic problems at the level of a person with a PhD. Level 3 refers to AI agents capable of taking actions on a users behalf. Level 4 involves AI that can create new innovations. Level 5, the final step to achieving AGI, is AI that can perform the work of entire organizations of people. OpenAI has previously defined AGI as a highly autonomous system surpassing humans in most economically valuable tasks.

OpenAIs unique structure is centered around its mission of achieving AGI, and how OpenAI defines AGI is important. The company has said that if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before OpenAI does, it commits to not competing with the project and dropping everything to assist. The phrasing of this in OpenAIs charter is vague, leaving room for the judgment of the for-profit entity (governed by the nonprofit), but a scale that OpenAI can test itself and competitors on could help dictate when AGI is reached in clearer terms.

Still, AGI is still quite a ways away: it will take billions upon billions of dollars worth of computing power to reach AGI, if at all. Timelines from experts, and even at OpenAI, vary wildly. In October 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said we are five years, give or take, before reaching AGI.

This new grading scale, though still under development, was introduced a day after OpenAI announced its collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory, which aims to explore how advanced AI models like GPT-4o can safely assist in bioscientific research. A program manager at Los Alamos, responsible for the national security biology portfolio and instrumental in securing the OpenAI partnership, told The Verge that the goal is to test GPT-4os capabilities and establish a set of safety and other factors for the US government. Eventually, public or private models can be tested against these factors to evaluate their own models.

In May, OpenAI dissolved its safety team after the groups leader, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, left the company. Jan Leike, a key OpenAI researcher, resigned shortly afterclaiming in a post that safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products at the company. While OpenAI denied that was the case, some are concerned about what this means if the company does in fact reach AGI.

OpenAI hasnt provided details on how it assigns models to these internal levels (and declined The Verges request for comment). However, company leaders demonstrated a research project using the GPT-4 AI model during an all-hands meeting on Thursday and believe this project showcases some new skills that exhibit human-like reasoning, according to Bloomberg.

This scale could help provide a strict definition of progress, rather than leaving it up for interpretation. For instance, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said in an interview in June that the models in its labs are not much better than what the public has already. Meanwhile, CEO Sam Altman said late last year that the company recently pushed the veil of ignorance back, meaning the models are remarkably more intelligent.

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Heres how OpenAI will determine how powerful its AI systems are - The Verge

OpenAI is developing a new project to enhance its AI models' reasoning capabilities, called Strawberry, according to documents first discovered by Reuters. The project is a key element in the efforts by OpenAI to achieve more powerful AI models capable of operating on their own when it comes to performing research.

According to the internal documents Reuters looked at, Strawberry is aimed at building an AI that will not only answer questions but search around online and perform follow-up research on its own. This so-called deep research trick would be a major leap beyond current AI models that rely on existing data sets and respond in ways that are already programmed.

There aren't details on the exact mechanisms of Strawberry, but apparently, it involves AI models using a specialized processing method after training on extensive datasets. This innovative approach could potentially set a new standard in AI development. An AI that can think ahead and perform research on its own to understand the world is much closer to a human than anything ChatGPT or other tools using AI models offer. It's a challenging goal that has eluded AI developers to date, despite numerous advancements in the field.

Reuters reported that Strawberry, which was then known as Q*, had made some breakthroughs. There were demonstrations where viewers witnessed AI could tackle science and math problems beyond the range of commercial models, and apparently, OpenAI had tested AI models that scored over 90% on a championship-level math problem data set.

Should OpenAI achieve its goals, the reasoning capabilities could transform scientific research and everyday problem-solving. It could help plug holes in scientific knowledge by looking for gaps and even offering up hypotheses to fill them. This would vastly accelerate the pace of discovery in various domains.

If successful, Strawberry could mark a pivotal moment in AI research, bringing us closer to truly autonomous AI systems capable of conducting independent research and offering more sophisticated reasoning. Strawberry is, it seems, part and parcel of OpenAIs long-term plans to demonstrate and enhance the potential of its AI models.

Even after GPT-3 and GPT-4 set new benchmarks for language processing and generation, there's a big leap to autonomous reasoning and deep research. But, it fits with other work on the road to artificial general intelligence (AGI), including the recent development of an internal scale for charting the progress of large language models.

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OpenAI may be working on AI that can perform research without human help which should go fine - TechRadar