Computer scientists at Microsoft reveal that a New AI system is showing signs of human reasoning. Read to know more.
Microsoft reveals new AI has human reasoning capacity
Last year when Microsoft computer scientists started experimenting with a new AI system, they asked it to solve a puzzle requiring an instinctive understanding of the physical world. “Here we have a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle, and a nail. Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner,” they asked. “Put the eggs on the book, it said. Arrange the eggs in three rows with space between them. Make sure you don’t crack them. Place the laptop on top of the eggs, with the screen facing down and the keyboard facing up. The laptop will fit snugly within the boundaries of the book and the eggs, and its flat and rigid surface will provide a stable platform for the next layer,” it answered.
The answer provided by the new AI shocked the researchers. Additionally, the clever suggestion made them wonder if this was human reasoning. This is the capacity to consciously make sense, verify and establish facts, change or justify and apply logic. In March 2023, they published a paper arguing that this was a step forward to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is a machine that can do everything that the human brain can. Microsoft is the first big tech firm to make such a blame game and this rises a big question. However, AGI claims can be a reputation killer since signs of intelligence are highly subjective and debatable.
Are tech firms building something similar to human intelligence?
Microsoft’s paper titled “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence” dwells deep into the work. It questions if they create a machine with human reasoning and the ability to work like or better than the human brain, it can change the world. However, this very reason can make it dangerous. “I started off being very skeptical — and that evolved into a sense of frustration, annoyance, maybe even fear. You think: Where the heck is this coming from?” stated Peter Lee. Lee leads the research at Microsoft.
“The ‘Sparks of A.G.I.’ is an example of some of these big companies co-opting the research paper format into P.R. pitches. They literally acknowledge in their paper’s introduction that their approach is subjective and informal and may not satisfy the rigorous standards of scientific evaluation,” stated Maarten Sap. Sap is a professor and researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.
“When we see a complicated system or machine, we anthropomorphize it; everybody does that — people who are working in the field and people who aren’t. But thinking about this as a constant comparison between A.I. and humans — like some sort of game show competition — is just not the right way to think about it,” explained Dr. Alison Gopnik. Dr. Gopnik is a professor of psychology and a part of the University of California, Berkeley’s A.I. research group. Additionally, while systems like GPT-4 are powerful it is unclear if the text they generate is the result of human reasoning.