Fans and foes of generative AI believe the biggest, most powerful AI models, including ChatGPT, will operate with the intelligence of a legit Ph.D. student as soon as next year. AI has gone from high schooler to college grad to mediocre Ph.D. student so fast that it’s easy to miss the profound implications of having such scalable intelligence in the hands of everyone. Eventually, “we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote this past week in a manifesto called “The Intelligence Age.” Altman and others believe we’ll each have personal AI assistants with unlimited Ph.D.s, working 24/7, doing everything from managing medical records to booking flights to … unleashing chaos on enemies. Altman’s “we” means all of us — good, bad, and ugly. AI optimists envision a future so bright and prosperous that today’s words can hardly capture the splendor. This isn’t about having a smarter Alexa or a better chatbot. It’s about having an AI assistant with the intelligence, knowledge and creativity of an entire team of PhDs — an assistant that never sleeps, never quits, and keeps getting better. These models are still works in progress. On the “Hard Fork” podcast, the N.Y. Times’ Kevin Roose quoted Terry Tao, a world-famous mathematician and UCLA professor, as saying OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model — known as Strawberry, and released this month — is “like working with a mediocre but not completely incompetent graduate student.”
Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg has consistently warned about the fuzzy utopianism surrounding today’s AI. Many models don’t perform with enough consistency or accuracy to truly turn them loose.
Full report : Future of Generative AI will mean having a Ph.D. army in your pocket.
