Google Engineer Says Sam Altman-Led OpenAI Set Back AI Research Progress By 5-10 Years: 'LLMs Have Sucked The Oxygen Out Of The Room'

A software engineer at Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) said that ChatGPT-parent OpenAI has hindered the advancement of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI by 5 to 10 years.

What Happened: In a conversation with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, which was posted on his YouTube channel on Tuesday, Google software engineer François Chollet expressed his concerns about the state of AGI research.

He stated that OpenAI has “single-handedly changed the game” and set back progress towards AGI by a significant number of years.

Chollet pointed out that a few years ago, all state-of-the-art results were openly shared and published, but this is no longer the case. He attributed this change to OpenAI’s influence, accusing them of causing a “complete closing down of frontier research publishing.”

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He went on to criticize OpenAI for triggering hype around Large Language Models or LLMs, which he believes have diverted resources and attention away from other potential areas of AGI research.

“OpenAI basically set back progress towards AGI by quite a few years probably like five to 10 years for two reasons. They caused this complete closing down of Frontier research publishing but also they triggered this initial burst of hype around LLMs and now LLMs have sucked the oxygen out of the room,” he stated.

Chollet also reminisced about the earlier days of AI research, stating that despite fewer people being involved, the rate of progress felt higher due to the exploration of more diverse directions. He lamented the current state of the field, where everyone seems to be doing variations of the same thing.

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Why It Matters: Chollet’s criticism comes after he and Mike Knoop, the co-founder of Zapier, announced the $1 million ARC-AGI Prize. The competition, which Chollet created in 2019, measures AGI’s ability to acquire new skills and solve novel, open-ended problems efficiently.

Despite 300 teams attempting ARC-AGI last year, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) score has only increased from 20% at inception to 34% today, while humans score between 85-100%, noted Knoop.

He said their goal with this prize is to increase the number of researchers focusing on frontier AGI research rather than tinkering with LLMs and “Beat ARC-AGI and learn something new about the nature of intelligence.”

Taking to X, formerly Twitter, Knoop said in simplest words people can describe the ARC Prize thinking that training ChatGPT on more data will not result in human-level intelligence.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.