What is Q-Star of OpenAI?
Hey Everyone,
It’s gotten a bit confusing trying to crack and track the difference between the VC-backed Accelerationists and Safetyists (including the two female OpenAI board members who were terminated).
And everyone has been asking, why was Sam Altman fired in the first place? What could have led to such a debate, conflict and outcome?
According to Reuters, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told the outlet.
The battle between Open-source advocates and closed-source commercialists is already bad enough, but what if GPT-5 had elements of Q-star that actually are dangerous?
According to one of the sources, long-time executive Mira Murati told employees on Wednesday that a letter about the AI breakthrough called Q* (pronounced Q-Star), precipitated the board’s actions.
The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q*, which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.
Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said.
Of course we don’t quite know what this Q* refers to exactly and this may only be a rumor. But it seems as if the hype over AGI is creating some trepidation among some. The lack of female professionals on Silicon Valley boards is of course nothing new. However, in terms of inclusion and risk aversion, it may be a good idea to have women knowledgeable about AI directly, on such a board if you really are aiming for AGI, so it’s perplexing why the two female OpenAI AI research heavy board members were fired.
Unfortunately it seems OpenAI’s investors would have to green light female board members, considering what occurred with Adam and the last two who were fired. It’s not clear what appreciation of X-risk Adam D’Angelo has but that Poe is a competitor to ChatGPT is pretty certain.
The new board members represent your typical run-of-the-mill boys club Silicon Valley male founders. It’s not clear if Adam, Larry or Bret have any grounding in A.I. research or anything remotely near x-risk studies. That the new board members have no real knowledge of AI systems is puzzling and that two of them have AI projects (including Poe by Quora) of their own is also likely a conflict of interests.
If you had a graph of different types of A.I. advocates and researchers, you’d have:
Accelerationist Product Salesmen
Safetyists
Open-Source Researchers
Proprietary Closed-Source
Of course #1 have some alignment with #4 in this case Sam Altman’s faction. But it’s the other side of Safetyists and Open-source Researchers where things get more interesting outside of the BigTech centralization of Generative A.I. so far.
How they define and approach AGI is also significantly different. Which is beyond the scope of this short article. But whatever Q* is, it could be significant.
Twitter, Threads, Reddit and LinkedIn should be full of speculation by now what Q* is or what this letter might have signified. Sam Altman is very much skewed to PCS and APS as shown above and is thus being backed heavily by Silicon Valley that wants to continue to profit from the marketing around AGI, that is seen as a financial windfall as far as hype cycles go in Silicon Valley.
The new movement in France around Open-source Research is a very exciting contrast to what America has done merging Generative A.I. with their skewed Monopoly Capitalism structure tethered to the Cloud and augmenting basically Surveillance Capitalism.
That the Accelerationists vs. Safetyists took place again within OpenAI and its Board is unfortunate, because it’s only perhaps the third of fourth time in as many years there. Microsoft made sure there wasn’t any resistance left. Which could be alarming for how civilization interacts with commercial AGI that will be “manufactured” ASAP.
In the Letter announced by Reuters, Q* was mentioned in relation to AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which makes matters even more confusing. This is after all the marketing goal of OpenAI, in their branding. This is all rather speculative until we know more about its content and the supposed breakthrough.
OpenAI are always doing public relations and PR stunts, and put nothing past them at this point. Even as ChatGPT struggles to retain daily active users, with outages, issues and pushing product as fast as possible – a product many of us just don’t find that sticky.
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