“Sam Altman Accepts the 2023 Hawking Fellowship Award § Is There Another Breakthrough That’s Needed to Reach AGI?”, 2023-11-01 ():
Cambridge student: “To get to AGI, can we just keep min maxing language models, or is there another breakthrough that we haven’t really found yet to get to AGI?”
Sam Altman: “We need another breakthrough. We can still push on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that. We can take the hill that we’re on and keep climbing it, and the peak of that is still pretty far away.
But, within reason, I don’t think that doing that will (get us to) AGI. If (for example) super intelligence can’t discover novel physics I don’t think it’s a superintelligence. And teaching it to clone the behavior of humans and human text—I don’t think that’s going to get there. And so there’s this question which has been debated in the field for a long time: what do we have to do in addition to a language model to make a system that can go discover new physics?”