The OpenAI Algorithm: More Data Plus More Money Equals More Intelligence
November 13, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb humanoid. No smart software required.
The Financial Times (I continue to think of this publication as the weird orange newspaper) published an interview converted to a news story. The title is an interesting one; to wit: “OpenAI Chief Seeks New Microsoft Funds to Build Superintelligence.” Too bad the story is about the bro culture in the Silicon Valley race to become the king of smart software’s revenue streams.
The hook for the write up is Sam Altman (I interpret the wizard’s name as Sam AI-Man), who appears to be fighting a bro battle with the Google’s, the current champion of online advertising. At stake is a winner takes all goal in the next big thing, smart software.
In the clubby world of smart software, I find the posturing of Google and OpenAI an extension of the mentality which pits owners of Ferraris (slick, expensive, and novel machines) in a battle of for the opponent’s hallucinating machine. The patter goes like this, “My Ferrari is faster, better looking, and brighter red than yours,” one owner says. The other owner says, “My Ferrari is newer, better designed, and has a storage bin”.) This is man cave speak for what counts.
When tech bros talk about their powerful machines, the real subject is what makes a man a man. In this case the defining qualities are money and potency. Thanks, Microsoft Bing, I have looked at the autos in the Microsoft and Google parking lots. Cool, macho.
The write up introduces what I think is a novel term: “Magic intelligence.” That’s T shirt grade sloganeering. The idea is that smart software will become like a person, just smarter.
One passage in the write up struck me as particularly important. The subject is orchestration, which is not the word Sam AI-Man uses. The idea is that the smart software will knit together the processes necessary to complete complex tasks. By definition, some tasks will be designed for the smart software. Others will be intended to make super duper for the less intelligent humanoids. Sam AI-Man is quoted by the Financial Times as saying:
“The vision is to make AGI, figure out how to make it safe . . . and figure out the benefits,” he said. Pointing to the launch of GPTs, he said OpenAI was working to build more autonomous agents that can perform tasks and actions, such as executing code, making payments, sending emails or filing claims. “We will make these agents more and more powerful . . . and the actions will get more and more complex from here,” he said. “The amount of business value that will come from being able to do that in every category, I think, is pretty good.”
The other interesting passage, in my opinion, is the one which suggests that the Google is not embracing the large language model approach. If the Google has discarded LLMs, the online advertising behemoth is embracing other, unnamed methods. Perhaps these are “small language models” in order to reduce costs and minimize the legal vulnerability some thing the LLM method beckons. Here’s the passage from the FT’s article:
While OpenAI has focused primarily on LLMs, its competitors have been pursuing alternative research strategies to advance AI. Altman said his team believed that language was a “great way to compress information” and therefore developing intelligence, a factor he thought that the likes of Google DeepMind had missed. “[Other companies] have a lot of smart people. But they did not do it. They did not do it even after I thought we kind of had proved it with GPT-3,” he said.
I find the bro jockeying interesting for three reasons:
- An intellectual jousting tournament is underway. Which digital knight will win? Both the Google and OpenAI appear to believe that the winner comes from a small group of contestants. (I wonder if non-US jousters are part of the equation “more data plus more money equals more intelligence”?
- OpenAI seems to be driving toward “beyond human” intelligence or possibly a form of artificial general intelligence. Google, on the other hand, is chasing a wimpier outcome.
- Outfits like the Financial Times are hot on the AI story. Why? The automated newsroom without humans promises to reduce costs perhaps?
Net net: AI vendors, rev your engines for superintelligence or magic intelligence or whatever jargon connotes more, more, more.
Stephen E Arnold, November 13, 2023
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