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🏠 What Did Ilya See?

🏠 What Did Ilya See?

OpenAI's secret breakthrough

Stephen Flanders
November 24, 2023

Gm. Happy belated Thanksgiving, and happy Black Friday! This year, I’m grateful for a few things. My health, my girlfriend, Aldi, and, of course, all of you for continuing to tune in newsletter after newsletter. Without you, I wouldn’t have a job…literally.

— Stephen Flanders

🏠 AI

OpenAI’s Q*

I intentionally avoided an OpenAI lead story on Wednesday, but much like Sam Altman, we are so back.

This story is just too good to pass up.

The big mystery surrounding Samas firing was always “why?”. Why fire the face of your company with no warning right before you’re about to raise a boatload of money? Unfortunately, the board decided to go zero-dark thirty and keep their reasoning private.

However, it appears we now have some answers.

According to reports, OpenAI had developed a model known as Q* (Q-Star) which was able to solve basic math problems it had not seen before. This was something that models were not able to do before because math isn’t like writing. You can’t just predict the next word. You have to be able to reason your way to the answer.

So, Q* is a model with at least some elementary ability to reason. Which would add some context to comments Sama made recently:

if Q* is an agentic algorithmic breakthrough that can reason and goal seek via something like A* search against an entire world model embedding, it completely explains this weird statement from sam last week:
"Is this a tool we've built or a creature?"
twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Siqi Chen (@blader)
Nov 23, 2023

Couple that reasoning breakthrough with OpenAI’s ability to predict how intelligent a model will be based on compute, and you can at least begin to form a roadmap for AGI.

If you’re a little bit freaked right now, you’re not alone. Some of OpenAI’s researchers were as well, so they sent a letter to the board which pretty much said “holy crap”, and next thing you know Sama is out of a job.

Is this really the breakthrough that leads to AGI? I have no idea, but I’m pretty confident with Sama back at the helm and more powerful than ever, we’ll find out sooner or later.

Survey Says: Betting markets have the date for AGI as February 10th, 2031. That’ll be an interesting Valentine’s Day.

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