OpenAI has created an internal scale to track the progress its large language models are making toward artificial general intelligence, or AI with human-like intelligence, a spokesperson told Bloomberg.
Today’s chatbots, like ChatGPT, are at Level 1. OpenAI claims it is nearing Level 2, defined as a system that can solve basic problems at the level of a person with a PhD. Level 3 refers to AI agents capable of taking actions on a user’s behalf. Level 4 involves AI that can create new innovations. Level 5, the final step to achieving AGI, is AI that can perform the work of entire organizations of people. OpenAI has previously defined AGI as “a highly autonomous system surpassing humans in most economically valuable tasks.”
OpenAI’s unique structure is centered around its mission of achieving AGI, and how OpenAI defines AGI is important. The company has said that “if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI” before OpenAI does, it commits to not competing with the project and dropping everything to assist. The phrasing of this in OpenAI’s charter is vague, leaving room for the judgment of the for-profit entity (governed by the nonprofit), but a scale that OpenAI can test itself and competitors on could help dictate when AGI is reached in clearer terms.
This new grading scale, though still under development, was introduced a day after OpenAI announced its collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory, which aims to explore how advanced AI models like GPT-4o can safely assist in bioscientific research. A program manager at Los Alamos, responsible for the national security biology portfolio and instrumental in securing the OpenAI partnership, told The Verge that the goal is to test GPT-4o’s capabilities and establish a set of safety and other factors for the US government. Eventually, public or private models can be tested against these factors to evaluate their own models.
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