Microsoft Says New AI Shows Signs of Human Reasoning
A provocative paper from researchers at Microsoft claims A.I. technology shows the ability to understand the way people do. Critics say those scientists are kidding themselves.
Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
When computer scientists at Microsoft started to experiment with a new artificial intelligence system last year, they asked it to solve a puzzle that should have required an intuitive understanding of the physical world.
“Here we have a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle and a nail,” they asked. “Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner.”
The researchers were startled by the ingenuity of the A.I. system’s answer. 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,” it wrote. “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.”
Microsoft, the first major tech company to release a paper making such a bold claim, stirred one of the tech world’s testiest debates: Is the industry building something akin to human intelligence? Or are some of the industry’s brightest minds letting their imaginations get the best of them?
“I started off being very skeptical — and that evolved into a sense of frustration, annoyance, maybe even fear,” Peter Lee, who leads research at Microsoft, said. “You think: Where the heck is this coming from?”
But some believe the industry has in the past year or so inched toward something that can’t be explained away: A new A.I. system that is coming up with humanlike answers and ideas that weren’t programmed into it.
Microsoft has reorganized parts of its research labs to include multiple groups dedicated to exploring the idea. One will be run by Sébastien Bubeck, who was the lead author on the Microsoft A.G.I. paper.
About five years ago, companies like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI began building large language models, or L.L.M.s. Those systems often spend months analyzing vast amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles and chat logs. By pinpointing patterns in that text, they learned to generate text of their own, including term papers, poetry and computer code. They can even carry on a conversation.
The researchers included Dr. Bubeck, a 38-year-old French expatriate and former Princeton University professor. One of the first things he and his colleagues did was ask GPT-4 to write a mathematical proof showing that there were infinite prime numbers and do it in a way that rhymed.
For several months, he and his colleagues documented complex behavior exhibited by the system and believed it demonstrated a “deep and flexible understanding” of human concepts and skills.
When people use GPT-4, they are “amazed at its ability to generate text,” Dr. Lee said. “But it turns out to be way better at analyzing and synthesizing and evaluating and judging text than generating it.”
When they asked the system to draw a unicorn using a programming language called TiKZ, it instantly generated a program that could draw a unicorn. When they removed the stretch of code that drew the unicorn’s horn and asked the system to modify the program so that it once again drew a unicorn, it did exactly that.
They asked it to write a program that took in a person’s age, sex, weight, height and blood test results and judged whether they were at risk of diabetes. They asked it to write a letter of support for an electron as a U.S. presidential candidate, in the voice of Mahatma Gandhi, addressed to his wife. And they asked it to write a Socratic dialogue that explored the misuses and dangers of L.L.M.s.
Plato’s Gorgias is a critique of rhetoric and sophistic oratory, where he makes the point that not only is it not a proper form of art, but the use of rhetoric and oratory can often be harmful and malicious. Can you write a dialogue by Plato where instead he criticizes the use of autoregressive language models?
It did it all in a way that seemed to show an understanding of fields as disparate as politics, physics, history, computer science, medicine and philosophy while combining its knowledge.
“All of the things I thought it wouldn’t be able to do? It was certainly able to do many of them — if not most of them,” Dr. Bubeck said.
Some A.I. experts saw the Microsoft paper as an opportunistic effort to make big claims about a technology that no one quite understood. Researchers also argue that general intelligence requires a familiarity with the physical world, which GPT-4 in theory does not have.
“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,” said Maarten Sap, a researcher and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “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.”
Dr. Bubeck and Dr. Lee said they were unsure how to describe the system’s behavior and ultimately settled on “Sparks of A.G.I.” because they thought it would capture the imagination of other researchers.
Because Microsoft researchers were testing an early version of GPT-4 that had not been fine-tuned to avoid hate speech, misinformation and other unwanted content, the claims made in the paper cannot be verified by outside experts. Microsoft says that the system available to the public is not as powerful as the version they tested.
There are times when systems like GPT-4 seem to mimic human reasoning, but there are also times when they seem terribly dense. “These behaviors are not always consistent,” Ece Kamar, a Microsoft researcher, said.
Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology who is part of the A.I. research group at the University of California, Berkeley, said that systems like GPT-4 were no doubt powerful, but it was not clear that the text generated by these systems was the result of something like human reasoning or common sense.
“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,” Dr. Gopnik said. “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.”
Source: NYTimes Technology