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Sparks of AGI: early experiments with GPT-4

Sebastien Bubeck7 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2026
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lecture · intermediate · 2023–2026 on HN

Sebastien Bubeck presents the Sparks of AGI paper at MIT, showing early experiments with GPT-4 across many domains and asking whether artificial intelligence has arrived. It includes the TikZ unicorn example.

HN recommends it as a thought-provoking talk from a researcher with early GPT-4 access, especially for the unicorn degrading under safety tuning.

12 comments from Hacker News

@Topfi2025-10 · in “Gemini 3.0 spotted in the wild through A/B testing”

It goes back to Sparks of AGI [0] unless I am mistaken. Can recommend the talk, one that has stayed in the back of my mind since I first saw it two years ago. Personally, still have major reservations about throwing claims of intelligence or understanding around, but I do agree that SVG code generation can be a very effective source to get a quick and easy to present understanding of a models ability to output code with a rather open ended prompt that needs a high degree of coherence and were a lot of layers depend/build on each other. Helps that these are eye catching (literally as the output is visual) and easy to grasp. Same reason a lot of hype is created around the web desktops. [0] ▶ this video

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@neom2023-05 · in “ChatGPT Egg Balancing Task Convinced Microsoft That AGI Is Closer”

Highly highly highly recommend listen to this lecture by Sebastien Bubeck (the dude who wrote the paper), it's extremely interesting: ▶ this video

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@lhl2023-04 · in “The LLama Effect: Leak Sparked a Series of Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT”

If you (or anyone else is) interested in the topic, I'd highly recommend giving some of these a look: Bubeck, Sébastien, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, Johannes Gehrke, Eric Horvitz, Ece Kamar, Peter Lee, et al. “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4.” arXiv, March 27, 2023. link . or watching Sebastien Bubeck's recent talk he gave describing what GPT-4 can do that previous LLMs couldn't: ▶ this video Geoffrey Hinton recently gave a very interesting interview and he specifically wanted to address the "auto-complete" topic: link Here's another way that Ilya Sutskever recently described it (comparing GPT 4 to 3): link I'd also recommend this recent Sam Bowman article that does a goood job reviewing some of the surprising recent developments/properties of the current crop of LLMs that's pretty fascinating: Bowman, Samuel R. “Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models.” arXiv, April 2, 2023. link .

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@iamflimflam12023-04 · in “What GPT-4 Does Is Less Like “Figuring Out” and More Like “Already Knowing””

I used to say this as well, I’ve written blog posts and made videos saying exactly this. But - I would strongly recommend trying GPT4. There’s a very good video that is worth watching as well that may not change your mind, but will certainly make you think: ▶ this video The thing to remember is that these models are unbelievably huge and deep. We don’t know what is really happening in the layers or what it has really learned. Thinking that it’s a simple language model that is just predicting the next most likely word is unwise.

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@nazka2023-06 · in “GPT4 Can’t Ace MIT”

You should take a look at this video. He is a researcher at Microsoft and had accès to private version of ChatGPT. He literally claims that ChatGPT 4 is not as good as before. His talk actually demonstrates the different evolutions. ▶ this video

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