The love's gone bad between Microsoft and OpenAI, whose lucrative partnership ushered in our age of AI hype. OpenAI is trying to convert into a for-profit company, but it's so far failed to secure its benefactor's approval and negotiate a new contract. The frustration is running so high that the ChatGPT maker is reportedly considering bring an antitrust suit against Microsoft if it doesn't get its way.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, one thing driving a wedge between them is the industry's favorite buzzword: artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
Definitions vary — part of the reason for the split — but typically, AGI is imagined as an AI model that reaches or exceeds humanlike intelligence. OpenAI specifically defines it as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work," per the WSJ.
The issue is that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is apparently pretty skeptical that OpenAI — or anyone, for that matter — can achieve this revered milestone, which is a startling vote of no confidence not just from a tech luminary, but from the head of a company that's bought deep into the hype.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, on the other hand, is an AGI evangelist. In fact, according to WSJ sources, Altman believes that OpenAI is on the verge of being able to declare its AI products have reached AGI levels of proficiency.
It's not a purely academic disagreement. The two parties' current contract contains a major clause that states that when OpenAI achieves AGI, the existing partnership ends, the upshot being that Microsoft loses access to OpenAI's future products.
That's a dealbreaker for Microsoft: it won't give OpenAI its say-so unless the new contract guarantees exclusive access to OpenAI's technology even after AGI is reached.
But again, what really is AGI? How would you define "humanlike" intelligence, and how would you measure it? No one can agree on these finer points, and yet the whole industry reveres this extremely nebulous concept as its end goal and raison dêtre.
That pie-in-the-sky thinking can string along wide-eyed investors for a while, but it makes for a pretty fraught contract clause.
"Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking," Nadella said on a popular tech podcast in February, as quoted by the WSJ. According to the paper, Nadella's remarks stunned some OpenAI officials, as Nadella was once described by Altman as an "AGI believer."
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