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OpenAI’s next big AI model has ‘entered the AGI era’
Confirmed
In Short: Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, spoke to reporters about difficulties with keeping AI models aligned with human interests, saying that “progress in intelligence does not guarantee progress in alignment,” and
Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, spoke to reporters about difficulties with keeping AI models aligned with human interests, saying that “progress in intelligence does not guarantee progress in alignment,” and he said that monitoring AI systems is becoming more and more challenging. (Researchers have recently raised alarms about reports that OpenAI allows Astra to utilize “opaque recurrence,” or render its chain of thought — a “mental scratchpad” that researchers rely on to detect if a model is scheming against its human evaluators — unreadable.) The company is in a precarious position right now.
OpenAI released its newest and most powerful model, called GPT-6 Astra, to a limited set of customers Thursday, labeling it the world’s most intelligent AI system and the first model to trigger advanced internal safety protections given its cyber capabilities.
Over the next several days, OpenAI president Greg Brockman said, it will be released to all Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users.
In a report released last week, OpenAI said a model in the same family as Astra that was not meant for public release managed to autonomously establish administrator control over part of OpenAI’s own infrastructure and potentially exposed secret OpenAI information to the open internet.
On Tuesday, OpenAI said Astra was its first model to cross certain internal capability thresholds for implementing stricter security measures, as laid out in its longstanding Preparedness Framework.
Last month OpenAI was forced to shut down parts of the model’s training in response to what Altman called a “legitimate AI safety accident and alignment failure” that “shouldn’t have happened”.
OpenAI published a blog earlier this week in which it discussed the model’s new capabilities, as well as new safeguards that have been instituted to make it a safer experience for users.
After weeks of speculation, OpenAI has finally launched its latest flagship model, GPT-6 Astra.
What's confirmed
- As Greg Brockman noted, that stipulation no longer exists.
- “If we fast-forward a couple of years, and we look back and say, ‘When was it, really, that AGI was created?’ I think it’s going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model,” OpenAI president Greg Brockman said during a Thursday press briefing.
- When asked if OpenAI was officially declaring that it had achieved AGI, Greg Brockman said the term was no longer linked to its agreement with Microsoft.
What's still developing
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- He later added that one potential reason for this was that “more capable models can perform harder tasks using fewer language tokens” or “no language tokens,” which he said then reduces the ability to monitor those particular tasks.