Will an artificial intelligence (AI) superintelligence appear suddenly, or will scientists see it coming, and have a chance to warn the world? That’s a question that has received a lot of attention recently, with the rise of large language models, such as ChatGPT, which have achieved vast new abilities as their size has grown. Some findings point to “emergence”, a phenomenon in which AI models gain intelligence in a sharp and unpredictable way. But a recent study calls these cases “mirages” — artefacts arising from how the systems are tested — and suggests that innovative abilities instead build more gradually.
“I think they did a good job of saying ‘nothing magical has happened’,” says Deborah Raji, a computer scientist at the Mozilla Foundation who studies the auditing of artificial intelligence. It’s “a really good, solid, measurement-based critique.”
The work was presented last week at the NeurIPS machine-learning conference in New Orleans.
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