Does GPT-4 augur the spark of AGI or end of science?

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By Gary Marcus | Mar 29, 2023

Image courtesy of and under license from Shutterstock.com

Marching into the future with an obstructed view is a bad idea, yet that seems to be happening with the rollout of GPT-4. For any of this to live up to its potential, there must be more transparency so the scientific community can identify areas of improvement and mitigate risks.

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This article has been adapted from the original version, which can be found on Gary Marcus' Substack.

Last week, Microsoft put out a press release - masquerading as science - that claimed that GPT-4 was “an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.” This is a silly claim, given that it is entirely open to interpretation - could a calculator be considered an early yet incomplete version of AGI? How about Eliza, or Siri? A claim like this would never survive serious scientific peer review. Still, in case anyone missed the point, Microsoft then put out another similar and even more self-promotional tweet:

As one might expect, this was accompanied by the usual gushing from fans:

Fortunately, there were also some solid critical points made:

Rather than just giving this the usual critical blow-by-blow, there is a deeper issue here that needs to be looked at. As I have said before in previous articles, GPT-4 does not actually have that much to do with AGI. The strengths and weaknesses of GPT-4 are qualitatively the same as before. The problem of

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