As part of a lawsuit against OpenAI, billionaire Elon Musk has asked a court to determine whether GPT-4 is an artificial general intelligence, capable of human-level tasks
By Chris Stokel-Walker
1 March 2024
Elon Musk is worried about the pace of AI development
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Elon Musk has asked a court to settle the question of whether GPT-4 is an artificial general intelligence (AGI), as part of a lawsuit against OpenAI. The development of AGI, capable of performing a range of tasks just like a human, is one of the leading goals of the field, but experts say the idea of a judge deciding whether GPT-4 qualifies is “impractical”.
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Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI in 2015, but he left it in February 2018, reportedly over a dispute about the firm changing from a non-profit to a capped-profit model. Despite this, he continued to support OpenAI financially, with his legal complaint claiming he donated more than $44 million to it between 2016 and 2020.
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Since the arrival of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship chatbot product, in November 2022, and the firm’s partnership with Microsoft, Musk has warned AI development is moving too quickly – a view only exacerbated by the release of GPT-4, the latest AI model to power ChatGPT. In July 2023, he set up xAI, a competitor to OpenAI.
Now, in a lawsuit filed in a California court, Musk, through his lawyer, has asked for “judicial determination that GPT-4 constitutes Artificial General Intelligence and is thereby outside the scope of OpenAI’s license to Microsoft”. This is because OpenAI has pledged to only license “pre-AGI” technology. Musk also has a number of other asks, including financial compensation for his role in helping set up OpenAI.
But can a judge decide when AGI has been achieved? “I think it’s impractical in the general sense, since AGI has no accepted definition and is something of a made-up term,” says Mike Cook at King’s College London.