GPT-4 — a shift from ‘what it can do’ to ‘what it augurs’

Do you want help to prepare for the bar examination, plan a birthday party, or even translate Ukrainian to Punjabi? Microsoft Research mentioned observing “sparks” of artificial general intelligence — a system that excels at several task types and can comprehend and combine concepts such as writing code to create a painting or expressing a mathematical proof in the form of a Shakespearean play — in GPT-4. The GPT-4 technical report clearly states: “Given both the competitive landscape and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details about the architecture, hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar.” While secrecy for safety sounds a plausible reason, OpenAI is able to subvert critical scrutiny of its model. A ‘stochastic parrot’ In essence, GPT-4 is a machine that predicts the next word in an unfinished sentence, based on probabilities it learned as it trained on large corpuses of text. This is why linguistics professor Emily Bender called GPT-4 a “stochastic parrot”, speaking in comprehensible phrases without understanding the meaning.