There have been reports that researchers at OpenAI had made a “breakthrough” in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some media agencies report that such researchers had come up with a new way to make powerful AI systems and had created a new model, called Q. Star, that was able to perform grade-school-level math.
Researchers have for years tried to get AI models to solve math problems. Language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 can do some math, but not very well or reliably.
People who worry about whether AI poses an existential risk to humans, one of OpenAI’s founding concerns, fear that such capabilities might lead to rogue AI. Safety concerns might arise if such AI systems are allowed to set their own goals and start to interface with a real physical or digital world in some ways, says Katie Collins, a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge.
However, while math capability might take us a step closer to more powerful AI systems, solving these sorts of math problems doesn’t signal the birth of a superintelligence.
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