What is Q Star, AI breakthrough allegedly responsible for Altman's ouster?

Q Star may bring OpenAI one step closer to making artificial general intelligence a reality

Sam Altman's ouster from OpenAI, known for its artificial intelligence (AI) software ChatGPT, and his eventual return have been the most important news in the AI world for the past week. While nobody knows exactly why OpenAI's board decided to remove Altman as the company's chief executive officer (CEO), a recent report suggests that a software named Q Star (Q*) may be behind it.

Herw we will try to understand what is this Q Star software. But before that, let us first understand what AGI or artificial general intelligence is, which is behind the software.

What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?

Most chatbots today, including ChatGPT, are specialised language models that focus on specific tasks and are trained for specific use cases. Although they interact with the user, they do so in an interactive manner.

Now, imagine software that thinks and evolves like humans. Its abilities are not limited to one field but include nearly everything. It has cognitive abilities and can learn and improve its capabilities over time. According to ChatGPT, AGI is capable of outperforming humans at "nearly any economically valuable work".

In a blog post earlier this year, Altman wrote at length about AGI. The blog read, "AGI has the potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities; we can imagine a world where all of us have access to help with almost any cognitive task, providing a great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity."

"If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility," it added.

However, no company has officially claimed that they have developed AGI software.

What is Q Star?

Now, Q Star may bring OpenAI one step closer to making AGI a reality. According to a Reuters report, before Altman's ouster from the company, a group of researchers sent a critical letter to the board discussing a new AI breakthrough, likely to be Q Star.

The report said Q Star could perform grade school-level mathematical questions. It aced the exams, making researchers optimistic about its future success.

Notably, Maths is considered to be a frontier for generative AI development.

Most models today are good at writing and translating. However, solving mathematical problems with only one solution shows that its reasoning capability works like human intelligence.

However, no official word about Q Star's capability has yet been released by the company.

Why did it ring alarm bells?

The researchers, in their letter to OpenAI's board, said that it may pose a threat to humanity. They also raised their concerns about the "over-commercialisation" of AI capabilities before completely understanding their consequences.

Is any other company working on AGI?

No other company has officially discussed working on AGI models, but reports suggest that Amazon may be in the race. According to a Business Insider report, Amazon is planning to build its own foundational models, AGI conversational assistants, and related infrastructure services.

It has also appointed Rohit Prasad, who earlier headed Alexa, as the head scientist on AGI at Amazon.