The back-and-forth in OpenAI’s leadership over the past week might indeed have been triggered by differing ideological stances among key segments of the staff. Reuters reported this, citing internal sources and referring to a research project, Q*, which supposedly achieved significant capabilities just days before Sam Altman’s dismissal.
According to the report, several top employees cautioned the board of the non-profit organization about the potential consequences of the research project.
This communication, along with other fundamental disagreements between the board and CEO Sam Altman, led to Altman’s termination. Altman himself emerged strengthened from the turmoil of a chaotic week and is returning as the CEO of OpenAI.
However, there is scarce meaningful information available about the actual capabilities of Q*. Internally, the company purportedly informed all employees about the project, but only through unexplained references to media reports.
Reuters mentioned that Q* is purportedly capable of independently solving certain mathematical problems at a school level. These associated capabilities apparently bolstered researchers’ confidence that the system could significantly enhance its performance in the future.
So far, OpenAI’s primarily researched and deployed systems have been large language models (LLMs) that inherently tend to provide varying answers for a task.
Language models fundamentally rely on probability distribution, striving to predict subsequent words as accurately as possible. However, mathematical tasks require logical deductions to arrive at a precise and consistent outcome, depending on the task at hand.
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