Artificial Intelligence’s Glass Ceiling

OpenAI’s stated goal is to develop and promote a software system capable of artificial general intelligence. Toward that end, the company has released systems based on large-language models, which can respond to prompts with fluent conversation on many subjects. ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing chatbot and other new systems based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 models are truly incredible and perform far beyond previous attempts at achieving AGI.

However, I would caution those who believe it can perform complex tasks without supervision to learn from AI’s history. Carefully crafted prototypes of intelligent software systems—especially those launched with spectacular fanfare—tend to wildly outperform their production counterparts for a reason.