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The Wild Claim at the Heart of Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI hinges on a dubious claim that the company has already developed ‘artificial general intelligence’—and handed it over to Microsoft.

Some experts might set the bar lower, arguing that GPT-4’s ability to perform a wide range of functions would justify calling it AGI, while others prefer to reserve the term for algorithms that can outsmart most or all humans at anything. “I have the sense that most of us researchers on the ground think that large language models [like GPT-4] are a very significant tool for allowing humans to do much more but that they are limited in ways that make them far from stand-alone intelligences,” adds Michael Jordan, a professor at UC Berkeley and an influential figure in the field of machine learning. In December 2022, shortly after he declared OpenAI’s newly launched ChatGPT “ scary good,” the entrepreneur suggested that an algorithm would need to “invent amazing things or discover deeper physics” to deserve the moniker.

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