Achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in today’s market has become a goal that all companies are moving towards. Whether it is possible or impossible at the moment, this research and development is being the key to changing current technology and elevating AI to a new preponderant level. With the arrival of GPT-4o, a substantial improvement in the model was observed, but we are still very far from meeting those objectives. Now, it seems that the company has lost the visible leader in this division.
Thus, Miles Brundage, the chief researcher of the preparation for the arrival of AGI has assured that he is leaving the company. His resignation is part of dozens of other resignations that the company has already accumulated since its foundation and that show a huge division within the company. However, he has assured that this has not been the case.
A farewell message
Brundage has published a fairly comprehensive farewell letter on his personal Substack, explaining all the reasons why he is leaving the company. Among them, he wants to work from outside in order to be able to publish reports that affect the entire AI industry and thus be able to achieve a fairer AI thanks to having more independence.
In fact, he is considering founding a new non-profit company or will join another to promote AI policies that make it beneficial and safe for humanity and that it cannot pose a danger to us.
As expected, he has also tried to explain the reasons why AGI has not been achieved at the moment and he has been quite clear, even if that includes lowering expectations of the potential of current AI laboratories:
In short, neither OpenAI nor any other cutting-edge laboratory is ready, and the world is not ready either. To be clear, I don’t think this is a controversial statement among OpenAI’s leaders, and in particular, that’s a different question from whether the company and the world are on track to be ready at the relevant time (although I think the remaining gaps are significant enough that I’ll be working on AI policy for the rest of my career).
After saying that the world is not ready, the former director himself shared an article explaining why it is not ready. He also says that on a scale of 1 to 5 until achieving AGI, the current point of development places it at the second step, close to human reasoning capacity.
Brundage believes that AI, when it reaches AGI, will be able to improve the lives of all people on the planet without problems. What happens is that it will need to be regulated and focused in a clear and planned way so that it can do so.
In addition, the team he led will be dissolved and incorporated into other groups. Something similar to what happened with the dissolution of the security team that occurred a few months ago.
