Microsoft researchers published a study arguing that OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI system was progressing toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). The 155-page paper, entitled “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” argues that GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of large language models (LLMs) “that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models.”

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4. Sebastien Bubeck Varun Chandrasekaran Ronen Eldan Johannes Gehrke Eric Horvitz Ece Kamar Peter Lee Yin Tat Lee Yuanzhi Li Scott Lundberg Harsha Nori Hamid Palangi Marco Tulio Ribeiro Yi Zhang Microsoft Research. Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4 [Ope23], was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data. In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models. We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. In our exploration of GPT-4, we put special emphasis on discovering its limitations, and we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. We conclude with reflections on societal influences of the recent technological leap and future research directions.”