OpenAI’s founding mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity." And the company defined AGI as an autonomous system that "outperforms humans at most economically valuable work." From this, you might assume that the company has to, at some point, at least try to, um, actually develop AGI.
Yesterday Bloomberg reported that OpenAI has come up with a five-tiered classification system to track its progress towards AGI. On the one hand, the formulation of these five tiers might make it appear that Sam Altman & Co. are charging ahead towards AGI in a systematic, metrics-based fashion. An OpenAI spokesperson said that the tiers, which the company shared with employees at an all-hands meeting, range from the kinds of conversational chatbots available today (Level 1) to AI that can do the work of an entire organization (Level 5). In between, Level 2 tackles human-level problem solving; Level 3 is all about agents, where systems can take actions; and Level 4 moves to AI that can aid in invention.
