Fact Or Fiction
🚀 What’s happening: We won’t recap the whole OpenAI saga (for that you can click here for a good summary), but what has us a little on edge is a report that several staffers sent a letter to the board of directors days before Sam Altman’s dismissal warning about a new breakthrough that could threaten human existence.
Go on.
Reportedly the breakthrough was an AI model named Q* (Q-Star) that can solve grade school level math problems correctly. Solving the same math problems as kids who still believe in Santa Claus may not sound impressive, but it is.
To date, AI models are much better at patterns and probabilities, but they struggle to answer questions with one right answer (i.e. math problems). The reason is that they source their information from available data, they don’t “solve it” themselves.
So what?
It’s worth noting that as of this publishing the report is still unconfirmed, but, if OpenAI did develop this type of AI, it would be the first step needed for achieving something called artificial general intelligence (AGI).
AGI in simple terms has been like the holy grail for these engineers. Anything with AGI is believed to be able to accomplish any task a human is capable of with the power to start to “reason” and “think” for itself.
👪 Closer to home: Whether or not this one story is 100% accurate, we think it is a matter of time until AGI happens, so we are firmly in the camp of those that think it is time to lobby Washington or some independent body to put some guardrails around this technology. We see a future with AI as exciting, but also terrifying at the same time.
From and investing standpoint, whether or not this news is real is likely to only accelerate the push toward AGI. Microsoft is the biggest shareholder of OpenAI, so the whole saga likely fuels speculation that Microsoft will buy the whole company one day.
We would also expect companies like Google to react if they think they are falling behind and the race for AI talent should heat up (so basically, if you have young kids it’s time to get them going in this field).
And in all seriousness, talk to your kids about AI, watch the headlines of companies in the space (NVIDIA, probably the biggest AI stock of the moment, just reported earnings), and don’t ever feel like you are too far behind to learn (you aren’t, the field of AI is really still just getting started).
Further Reading: How To Use AI To Invest In The Market
